Mother of Nightmares
by Mediancat
Summary: Nikita, not wanting to endanger her loved ones in her quest for vengeance on Amanda, calls on some old friends for aid instead . . .
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: _Buffy_ was created by Joss Whedon. _Nikita _was created by Craig Silverstein.

Author's Note: This fic picks up immediately after the ending of _Nikita_'s third season. It's set in the same broad universe as my Law and Order crossover Slayerz and my Eureka crossover Scarlet Witch, though it's not necessary to have read either of those fics. Suffice it to say that the Unbroken Academy is in Warren, Maryland, the approximate site of a Hellmouth, and that this is where the main training facility for Slayers is in North America. Giles, Faith, Xander, Robin Wood, and Andrew are stationed there, along with numerous young Slayers and Watchers, and Willow, Dawn, Buffy and Kennedy drop by regularly.

X

Nikita blinked away the tears as she drove away from the safe house. She wanted to believe what Alex had said, so very much; but she couldn't afford to.

She was dangerous to them. She was dangerous to everyone, now.

One thing was left: Vengeance. Amanda had made this happen. Amanda had gotten the President killed, and framed Nikita for doing it.

She wouldn't be able to do it alone, though. Alex had been right about that.

But there were other people she could use to help her. People she trusted - but didn't love the way she did Michael, and Alex, and Birkhoff, and Ryan, and even Sonya. People she didn't want dead - she wanted as few deaths as possible - but not the people she loved.

Not that, when they agreed to help her, she wouldn't move heaven and earth making sure nothing happened to them, either. Every meaningless death hurt.

But they wouldn't hurt as much.

Nikita hated quantifying lives this way. She did it, she realized that she did it, but that didn't make it a whole hell of a lot easier.

These people owed her one – a big one. Back between the time she'd escaped Division and the time she managed to get Alex into it, she'd stumbled across a group in Maryland that at first seemed suspiciously like Division until she found out otherwise . . .

X

Nikita watched as the girls left, mostly in pairs, sometimes alone. They never carried guns, but she could see other weapons; knives, crossbows, even stakes. Whether perky or grim, they carried themselves like professionals. They seemed way too young – some of them couldn't be more than fourteen.

Her first thought was that this Unbroken Academy was some kind of pre-training ground for Division; that these were the girls they got even younger than she'd been when she was recruited.

The hand-to-hand was off the charts already; some of these girls were up to her level, already – and deadly with the crossbow, which was a weapon Nikita had never mastered. Division hadn't spent a long time training its agents in the use of medieval weaponry, though they'd learned knives, staves, and improvising. (The idea being that you weren't always going to have access to actual weapons, so sometimes you had to make do with whatever was available.)

Nikita had only seen them at a distance; they moved quickly enough that she could barely keep them in sight, and the binoculars she'd been able to get on her own were not top of the line equipment. She saw them in combat from a distance, with humans, and things that only looked human.

Division didn't handle the supernatural, but they knew about it. Agents were taught what to do when their backs were against the wall if they ran across a vampire, or a hostile demon of some sort; but mostly they were taught to recognize, and avoid, and, if necessary, run. That was not their job. Even Percy had never strayed far into that aspect of the world, and Percy had been willing to do damn near anything if he'd felt it necessary.

And that put the kibosh on this being a Division training academy. Still didn't explain why nearly everyone involved seemed to be under 18 and female. That rankled with Nikita. Even if they were volunteers, they could have hardly known what they were volunteering for.

She had business with Division, but she couldn't turn her back when these women might be in danger.

Picking a couple to follow, almost at random, she went all out and made sure she kept up with them until they got to the outskirts of a golf course. They scaled the outside fence faster than she would have thought possible. At the count of five, she got ready to follow them -

And stopped.

_There was someone else there._

A couple of armed men – heavily armed by the look of things – got out of a nearby vehicle, the driver speaking into a phone in Russian while the other one excitedly pointed at the exact spot the girls had gone over the fence.

Straining to hear what the driver was saying, she picked up maybe one word in three, but the words for "ambush" and "bitches" and the phrase "stop interfering in our [something] trade" stood out clear as day.

The two men didn't bother scaling the fence; they simply walked to a nearby gate, unlocked it, and walked in.

_Now_ Nikita went after them. They'd left the gate unlatched, so she opened it quietly but quickly and looked around. It took her a few seconds, but the men were sneaking towards a wooded area overlooking one of the golf course's water hazards.

It wasn't large – maybe a dozen trees – but it was large enough to conceal them. The girls, meanwhile, were standing by the far edge of the water, talking in smug tones to a pair of – well, humanoids was the word that came to mind. She couldn't quite make out the words.

And she didn't have time to try, because the Russians weren't wasting any time. They both unlimbered a pair of Bushmasters and aimed them towards the girls.

Nikita didn't hesitate, picking up a rock and throwing it at the driver while charging at the other one. It hit the driver, startling him enough that he pulled the trigger without fully aiming, sending a shell into the water not five feet away from where the girls were confronting the humanoids. They scattered, as did the humanoids.

Nikita, meanwhile, hit the other Russian with her shoulder and wrenched the rifle from his hands before he hit the water a few feet below. The driver cursed and swung his rifle around to face her.

Rifles weren't close up weapons, though, and Nikita knocked the barrel upwards before he could get off a shot and knocked it from his hands, backing up. His partner had surfaced, but wasn't going anywhere now that Nikita held the only rifle.

"You are not one of them." he said in mildly accented English.

"No," Nikita said.

"You don't know who you're messing with," the one in the water said, in a thicker accent. Didn't know who she was messing with? Were the Russians picking out their hit men straight from Central Casting?

"My guess? Russian mob. And someone willing to kill teenaged girls. Neither one of which puts you high on my list."

"I think she does know who she's messing with," the driver said. "Which makes you either courageous or a fool."

"I've been called both," she said. Right then the man in the water pulled a pistol from somewhere under the water and started to level it at Nikita.

She turned and fired the Bushmaster, blowing off the top of his skull before he could shoot; the recoil was minimal, but enough to let the driver charge at her.

A crossbow bolt caught him in the shoulder before he could finish, and he tumbled into the water alongside his partner's corpse. Turning quickly, Nikita saw the two girls she'd been trailing. She nodded thanks, then turned and shot the driver twice in the chest. Then she wiped the rifles down, tossed them into the water hazard, and ran to join the girls, her hands up. "Thanks," she said.

"Thank _you_," the taller of the two said.

"You're welcome," Nikita said. "But could we save anything else for until we've gotten out of here? Bushmasters aren't exactly quiet and someone has to have called the cops."

"Right," the shorter one said. "Try to keep up."

And they turned and took off. Nikita, though pressed to her limits, kept up.

And that was how she met the Slayers and the other people from the Unbroken Academy.

X

Nikita shook her head. Enough reminiscing.

First things first. She turned her phone off - Birkhoff being Birkhoff, it would have been blindly stupid to do otherwise. So she needed to pick up a burner and make a phone call.

She needed to ditch the car, too. Birkhoff probably didn't have any actual tracking devices on it, but it wouldn't take him and Sonya more than twenty minutes to figure out some way to use something on it as a GPS.

If the picture of her in the White House had been clearer, she'd have wanted to try to disguise herself, too; but at the moment, what the world had was a blurry security camera image and a description that fit thousands of women. So she'd pick up some stuff for a quick makeover, but she wouldn't bother using it until it became necessary.

There was a shopping center up ahead. Drugstore, phone store; good enough for what she needed.

Twenty minutes later she was walking down the road, the car abandoned in a corner of the shopping center parking lot, new phone in her pocket and a bag from the drugstore hanging from her left hand. A half mile walk got her to a Burger King, where she ordered a chicken sandwich meal, sat down facing the street, and used her new phone for the first time.

Three rings and "Unbroken Academy. This is Andrew. How can I help you?"


	2. Obstacles

Author's Note: to the folks on TTH, I accidentally flagged this as being complete when it's nowhere near. The title makes no sense yet. It will.

The characters of Claudia Fuller and Gigi "Pinky" Ethier are mine.

X

There was a knock on Faith's office door.

Yeah. Faith had an office. She wouldn't've believed it ten years ago. Shit, she barely believed it now, but Giles had said all the higher-ups had to have offices, so boom, here she was. She did her damnedest to make it look as little like an office as possible; she had a desk, yeah, and a phone, and a chair, and even a computer, but the place otherwise looked more like a weapons storage locker than anywhere any sane person would sit down and do business. Course, she'd never exactly pretended to be sane.

She was in the middle of adjusting the training schedule – one of the Watchers was a distant relative of the President and needed to go to her funeral- and they needed to set up someone else to take his place – and was bored out of her freaking mind, so she was happy to see anything different, stopping just short of an actual apocalypse.

-and it was Andrew. "What is it?" Faith asked.

"Um, a phone call. Big one." She straightened up. Andrew knew damn well how to transfer calls, so if that had been anything routine he'd've just rung her up. "She says, and I quote, 'It's Nicky. I need that favor you owe me.' And then she said a password."

"Real one?" Andrew was supposed to come talk to someone either way. There were a few people out there, not part of the official network, who they trusted enough to be able to call on them if they had to – but they set up a password system just in case. Didn't work if the people were under duress or anything – something Willow'd set up, and magically it was way out of her pay grade. Didn't stop a few people from trying to fake 'em out, though. Never worked.

Andy said, "Yes. I asked her to wait while I came and told you and, well, she asked if you'd hurry. She sounded upset."

"Okay. Hustle back and transfer it through. Make it private." Anyone who could break through one of Willow's cones of silence was someone so badass that not having private phone calls wasn't something they were probably going to be giving a shit about.

Nodding, Andrew said, "Will do," and went back to the main switchboard.

Thirty seconds later, Faith's phone rang. Seeing that Andrew'd said Nikita'd seemed upset, she got businesslike. "Hey. Nicky. Faith. What do you need?"

"I need your help," she said.

"Yeah, I get that. If you're worried about the line, you don't need to be. It's as secure as it gets."

"You don't know Birkhoff," Nikita said. "I don't think he's good enough to be listening to my burner phone but I'd rather not take any chances. Besides, I have a lot of people looking for me."

Nikita was paranoid, but it ain't like she didn't have reasons. "So what else is new?" Faith asked.

"I mean, a _lot_ of people. Even more than last time. How fast can you get to Mt. Airy?"

"I can be out the door in five," Faith said.

"Meet me where we ate."

It took Faith a few seconds to realize that Nikita'd hung up. Okay, she said five, she needed to mean five. She hung up and dialed Andrew. "Andy? I need a driver out front in four minutes. Whoever you can get."

Nikita didn't sound like she was under fire, but still, better safe than sorry. Faith got a crossbow, stocked up on blunt bolts – Nikita might be okay with killing people, but Faith wasn't – and packed a flail, and hustled out to the Academy's front driveway.

Xander was there waiting for her. "Going my way?"

"You know it," Faith said. "Head west. I'll describe where on the way."

X

Ryan and Alex were in another room of their safe house, trying to keep Michael from charging out blindly looking for Nikita. And since Michael didn't seem particularly reasonable right at the moment, Seymour Birkhoff was happy to let the other two try to calm him down while he and Sonya did their best, with the limited resources they had, to try to track her.

Nicky had more experience than anyone else in trying to evade Division. Her cell phone was off, and her car was, according to the GPS tracker, about five miles away on a two-lane road and hadn't moved for twenty minutes – and Nicky wasn't the type to hole up in the woods, so Birkhoff could only assume she'd ditched the GPS and kept the car, at least for now.

Still, it gave them a vague idea of what direction she was headed in, so he hacked into as many cameras as he could going generally east-northeast, while he asked Sonya to check the opposite direction, in case Nicky was trying to get tricky.

It took Birkhoff a couple of hours to find his first trace, which was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack the size of Rhode Island. Considering that there were a metric shit-ton of cameras in range, and with the computers he was working with now and that he didn't have nearly the same kind of search program on the couple of laptops they'd brought with them as they'd had at Division headquarters – not that he was mourning the loss of those headquarters for a single second. Somehow, Ryan and Alex had talked Michael out of whatever act of impulsive stupidity he'd been about to try, but they weren't leaving him alone for a second, Nicky having burned them already.

It was grainy and at a distance, but if that wasn't her passing a bank in Frederick, Maryland, Birkhoff would do hand-to-hand with the next ninja they ran across. He told Sonya to lay off checking westward, and asked her to search around the far limits of where Nicky could get to if she was just driving full speed, trying to put as much distance between her and them as possible.

She agreed, and he concentrated on looking closer to Frederick.

What they were going to do when they found her, he didn't know. For now, at least, that wasn't his decision.

He hoped Alex or Michael could figure something out, though. Whether Nicky thought she was protecting them and was better off alone, they were all in this together; and they would figure out how to take down Amanda and make damn sure they fixed this frame Amanda'd set up. The rest of America might thing that Nicky, or someone who looked like her, had killed the president, but the five of them knew damn sure otherwise, and she would not go down for it.

X

Half an hour later, almost to the second, a black SUV pulled into the parking lot of the Mt. Airy Arby's. Nikita, sipping on a soda and slowly eating a cherry turnover, noticed it, as she'd noticed all the vehicles that pulled in in the last ten minutes or so, and, when she saw Faith get out and – Xander, she thought the man's name was, she certainly remembered the eyepatch – she got up, threw her trash out, and walked outside before either one of them got to the door.

They'd eaten at one of these four years ago, after she'd trailed the two girls back to the Academy.

X

They led her through an obstacle course of a run; down back roads, through wooded area, over two fences and through one rain culvert. Well, they _tried_ to lead her through the culvert; instead of plunging into the darkness, she went over the road and caught sight of them again on the other side. After a few seconds they stopped and looked back through the tunnel. She let out a short, sharp whistle and said, "Girls!"

They looked up, saw her standing on the shoulder of the road, laughed, and kept running.

Nikita was breathing heavily by the time they'd gotten to the Academy grounds. The girls stopped about fifty feet onto the property and held up their hands, gesturing for her to stop. The taller one came back and said, "Just stay there for a bit."

"Security system?"

The girl grinned. "Something like that. I'm Claudia, by the way. That's Pinky over there."

"My name is Gigi!" The girl in the distance yelled with a slight Quebecois accent.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Nikita." They both smiled and then jogged off towards a building maybe a quarter of a mile away.

She stayed there for maybe ten minutes until a short dark-haired woman maybe a few years younger than she walked up, with Claudia and Gigi trailing behind. "Okay," the woman said. "Girls here tell me you stopped a couple Russian goons from shooting them over at the golf course."

"That's right."

"You the same one that's been keeping an eye on us for the last few days?"

And Nikita blinked at that. These people were good, if they'd noticed her surveillance. And even now there were people watching her from a distance - the signs were slight, but they were there.

Fortunately, she'd never intended to run, so there was no point in lying. "Yeah. I thought you were something you're not."

"What did you think we were?"

"Part of a group called Division."

If the woman had ever heard of it, it didn't show on her face, but Nikita could tell that wasn't the answer she'd been expecting.

"Huh. Okay. You got wheels?"

"Nope."

"Pinky, run back to the main building and tell them I need a driver."

"Sure, Faith," Gigi said, and took off at a dead run, fast enough that Nikita would have needed something with an engine to catch up.

"So," the woman Nikita now knew to be Faith had said. "You like roast beef?"

X

"What's the rush?" Faith said as Nikita came towards the SUV.

"Yeah," Xander said. "You think I came all the way out here to not get some cherry turnover goodness?"

"I'll buy you a dozen turnovers," Nikita said. "Just not here."

The smile left Xander's face like it had fled at gunpoint. "You in immediate trouble?"

"Probably not," Nikita said. "I'm just better off not staying in one place right now." They all piled into the vehicle. Nikita got in back and they got on their way.

"So, Nicky," Faith said. "Why're you better off?"

"You know the person who they say shot the President?"

"Yeah . . . "

"That's me. I'm the one being framed."


	3. Line of Fire

The people at the Shop realized Amanda's interest in destroying Nikita. They knew that that was her priority.

That didn't stop them from forcing her to sit through unrelated meetings about work being done elsewhere, and asking for her opinion. She gave them as much attention as she could, answering questions concisely in the interest of getting it over with so she could get back to trying to end the problem of Nikita once and for all.

She'd been so close, framing Nikita for the death of the President – but once again, one of her allies had underestimated Nikita and allowed her to escape, which allowed Nikita a chance, however small, of circumventing Amanda's carefully laid plans.

It would have been easy to simply promulgate a clearer picture of Nikita from her walk through the White House, to have everyone in the country know what she looked like, and be looking for her; but this way, the torment for Nikita was more exquisite. Plus, were everyone to know who she was, there would be nothing stopping her and her allies from what would be effectively a suicide run to, at least, take Amanda herself down with them.

And that would never do.

Amanda did not fool herself into believing that Nikita had given up. This was delicate. Nikita needed to be off balance enough to keep her off her game without quite getting to the point that she had nothing left to lose. It was a matter of psychology, and she was an expert in all kinds of that, from child to adult.

Everyone around her was standing up. Good. The meeting was over. She muttered pleasantries and went back to her office.

On their way out, Nikita and Michael and Ryan and all the rest had blown up whatever was left of Division headquarters. Cheap, empty symbolism, but it meant that they had to have retreated to a safe house – and as hot as Nikita could be if someone looked at their leaked picture correctly, no doubt one fairly close by, somewhere in Virginia or Maryland.

So, while the remnants of the so-called "Dirty thirty" were dead, Amanda still had people she could call – those loyal to money, if nothing else. These people were scouring the area looking for any sign of Nikita, Michael. Ryan, Alex, or even Birkhoff or Sonya, though the latter two very rarely went topside.

She had gotten no messages yet. But she didn't hire incompetents. Eventually, they would find Nikita, and the noose would tighten.

X

Faith was rarely caught completely off-guard. This was one of those times. How Xander didn't run the SUV off the road, she had no clue. "What?"

Oh, she trusted Nikita when she said she was framed, but still, while the Academy had connections and cash, it wasn't like they could just whistle up a get-out-of-jail-free card for someone the world thought had killed the president. Wasn't like Faith paid a shitload of attention to politics, but what she'd seen of the woman, she'd liked.

So this favor had a shot of getting them a whole lot of attention, and Slayers and Watchers really didn't do well with a whole lot of attention.

Xander said, "I echo that, 'what?' And I think we're gonna need the whole story before we get back, 'cause there's no way we're getting anyone else involved in this without knowing what we're getting ourselves into."

Nikita nodded. "Fair enough. I wasn't expecting you to go in blind. Faith, remember when I told you about Amanda . . . ?"

X

The driver – a guy with an eyepatch, Xander something, Nikita thought – took them to a nearby Arby's. Not exactly the place she would have chosen for a debriefing, but it wasn't her show, and it certainly wasn't the first place Division would look for her.  
They ordered and sat down. Xander took his tray to the next booth over, and there was no way he was just a driver. He carried himself, to a lesser extent, like Claudia and Gigi had, and had an array of scars – and that was only where she could see. He wasn't trained like Nikita was, and he wasn't ex-military, but she knew better than to dismiss him.

Still, he wasn't the one she was here to talk to. "So," Faith said, biting into a potato cake. "What's Division and why the fuck did you think we were associated with them?"

Right down to business. Nikita liked that. When you lied and were lied to for a living, hearing someone saying what they felt flat out was a welcome relief. "Division is a top-secret organization associated with the US government. They carry out missions that are better off not being officially associated with the administration."

"You kill people," Faith said bluntly.

Nikita nodded. "That's not all we – they – do. There's also blackmail, theft, and flat out espionage."

"We, they?"

"I was one of them. I got tired of doing that kind of work, but it's not like they have a retirement plan."

"The only way you leave is foot first?" Faith asked.

"Exactly. I got out, and now I'm trying to figure out how to bring them down." She realized how it sounded when she said it. Still. Didn't make it any less true.

"So, to get back to my first question, what made you think we had anything to do with them?"

So Nikita explained her reasoning – and also when she'd figured out that they weren't Division, giving them a short description, naming only Percy and Amanda as the two biggest problems, and ending with, "Division never had anything to do with demons or vampires, apart from being taught how to fight them as best we could and get away. Didn't mean you didn't have something to do with the government, but at least it meant you weren't a training ground for Division."

"So you were watching us to what? Get the girls out?"

"If I'd thought it was the right thing, yes." She'd faced worse odds before.

"You said that 'recruited''s a bullshit word for how Division got you to work for them," Faith said. "It was the same way for me when I got the job." Faith then gave her a brief summary of the history of the Slayer, punctuated by occasional chuckles from Xander. Nikita had no idea what he was laughing at, but after the fourth time Faith said, "You think you can do any better, you can get your ass over here and do it yourself." This made the man crack up, for some reason. She growled but finished the story, following with, "Sounds to me like Division's kinda what the Council used to be – except that while they weren't the ones doing the drafting, they sure as shit wanted to run our lives afterward."

"But girls are still getting drafted," Nikita said.

"No, they ain't. They ain't got a say in whether they get the powers, but they get a say on whether they want to use 'em full-time. No one's forced to do it, any more. Girl tells us to fuck off and leave her alone, we do just that. Most don't. A few have. And we sure as shit don't kill 'em if they try to leave."

Being a Division agent for so long had damn near worn Nikita down with cynicism and suspicion. Everything everyone said was open for question, open for debate. Amanda made damn sure you thought that way. But she was fighting that. Everyone could lie, but that didn't mean everyone was at every possible moment.

"I believe you," she said.

"Yeah. I think you do. Still. Wanna see what's going on for yourself, make sure we ain't lying to you?"

"If you want." She had a mission; but she'd taken time out from trying to find someone to recruit to help her take down Division to checking up on these girls, so an extra few hours wasn't going to kill her. "I don't need it, though."

"Okay. 'cause I'm thinking I owe you one. You saved a couple of my girls tonight."

Shaking her head, Nikita said, "That's not why I did it."

"I know. And that's why we're letting you in. Unless –"

Unless?

"One question," Xander said. "Are you related to anyone named Warren?"

She and Faith said "Huh?" at the same time. By herself, she said, "No. Why?"

"No reason. Nothing for you to worry about if you're not. Otherwise, we're good."

"Five by five. Anything holding you back, Nicky?"

"My schedule's wide open."

Grinning wickedly, Faith said, "Good. Let's go."

X

Faith said, "Amanda? Yeah. Her and some dude named Percy were the big troublemakers, right?"

"Yeah. Percy's not a problem any more – a couple hundred foot drop will do that to most people. Amanda, though, is still out there and still doing her damnedest to destroy me and everyone I love."

"And so your first thought was to find someone else to throw into the line of fire?" Xander asked. "Gee, thanks."

And Nikita said, "You know what? Forget it. This was a bad idea. If I don't want to get my friends hurt, I shouldn't try to get anyone else hurt, either. I'll do this myself. Just do me a favor and drop me off."

"Whoa," Xander said. "I was just kidding. Sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain. I didn't mean it."

Sighing, Nikita said, "Doesn't matter. It's still true."

"The fuck it is," Faith said. "It ain't throwing people into the line of fire if they know damn well what they're getting into. You saying this is dangerous and someone could die? Nothing we don't do on a regular basis, except your bad guys got guns. Look. I owe you, and just 'cause I think you're the kind of person who'll let me go on that, I'm saying right now I'll help you even if you tell me you're not calling in that favor. And while we got other things we're doing we can probably scrape up a few other people as well. Pinky and Claudia are still around, for one."

"And I think Willow was looking for something to do," Xander said.

"Right. There we go, Nicky. You got your help. We good to go?"

A few seconds later, Nikita, "Yeah."

"Good. Now, let's get back to this President thing."


	4. Their Birkhoff

By the computer clock, it was less than a half hour after Birkhoff and Sonya had found the first traces of Nikita that Michael, Alex and Ryan came back into the main room. It had seemed like a lot longer – Michael was – well, he wasn't calmer, but Alex and Ryan weren't having to physically hold him back.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked.

"Playing World of Warcraft," Birkhoff said. "Be quiet, I'm about to grind out another level for my paladin. What the hell do you think we're doing? We're trying to track Nicky. So far we know she's headed east-northeast. I caught a glimpse of her from a bank camera in Frederick."

"And a few minutes ago," Sonya said softly, "I found a police car dashboard camera that showed her getting off Interstate 70 near Mt. Airy, Maryland. Would she know anyone there?"

"I don't think so," Michael finally said.

Ryan said, "We can't be completely sure there's not someone there, of course, but I don't think she's just going to stop there."

"Of course not," Michael spat out. "She's going after Amanda."

Now Alex was shaking her head. "She's not going to do that."

"Of course she's going to after Amanda," Birkhoff said. "Nicky's not just going to go hide out in the woods somewhere. That's not her style."

"No," Alex said. "Of course she's going to go after Amanda. But she's going to do it by herself. Think about it. She left us because she thought being here was hurting us. Do you really think she's going to do something that stands a good chance of hurting someone else?"

"That means we have to find her," Michael said, irritably. "If she's not going to hide out and she's not going to get help, and she's gearing up for a suicide run."

"You think so?" Ryan asked.

"Yeah."

Birkhoff basically agreed, though he didn't think Nicky actually had a death wish. "So we either find her, or we find Amanda," he said.

"Or we do both," Alex said.

"Everyone?" Sonya said. "Look at this." They all moved over to look at Sonya's computer. "Maybe she's about to try a kamikaze run, as it were, but it's entirely possible she won't be doing it alone. This is the security feed from a fast food place in Mt. Airy:"  
They saw two people get out of a dark SUV, a wavy-haired brunette in jeans and a leather jacket, and a man with an eyepatch, and then they saw Nikita run up to them, talk to them for a few seconds, and then get in.

Everybody looked at Michael, and Alex asked. "Who are they?"

And Michael said, "I have no idea."

X

Faith and Xander demanded and got the full story from Nikita. It wasn't until they were parking back on the Academy grounds that they stopped asking questions. Nikita told then the truth and nothing but the truth, and the only part of the whole truth she held back was that that might have gotten someone else in trouble. Made clear she was doing this, though.

"Okay," Xander said. "Wow. Just goes to prove, though, you can be a big bad and not want to rule the world or destroy it."

"The Shop's enjoying themselves too much to want to do either one," Nikita said. "And Amanda might like power but she wouldn't want to be open about it." She led Division, but it wasn't like Division was public. She'd never want to be President; she'd be worried that someone would do unto her as she'd had done unto others.

Faith said, "'sides, sounds like Amanda's made it personal, hurting you and yours, Nicky. This ain't a big plot; this is more like a vendetta. 'course, you got one too, but sounds like she's the one that made it personal first."

"She was. She's trying to prove that caring about others can only hurt you. That's why she threatened to kill Michael – she was trying to tell me that if I didn't love him, then I could have just told her to go to hell."

"That can happen," Faith said. "Don't make her right. I had a time when I'd've been her perfect agent. Remember?"

Nikita remembered. That had come up back when they'd first met . . .

X

Try as she might, Nikita couldn't get them to explain why they asked if she was related to anyone named Warren. She did ask if it had anything to do with the location of the Academy, and Xander just said, "No, that's just the gods laughing and pointing at us."

When they got back to the Academy grounds, they didn't stop at the entrance, instead taking her to the front of the building. About two dozen girls, ranging in ages from 13 to the point where it would've been wrong to call them girls, were sitting around the lobby, along with two other men. Gigi was telling everyone what had happened, until she saw Nikita. "Nikita ! Hi!"

She sounded enthusiastic. Full of life, full of energy. For the life of her, she couldn't remember ever feeling that young. Certainly not after she'd just gotten back from a mission where people had been killed.

Nikita smiled back.

In the meantime, the older of the two men stepped forward and said with a British accent, "Nikita? My name is Rupert Giles. It's good to meet you."

He carried himself with an air of authority – but not Percy's overwhelming one, or Amanda's sly one. This was someone who didn't apparently feel the need to constantly remind everyone who the boss was. "Likewise," Nikita said as they shook hands. The other man was introduced as Robin, and then every girl in the room said what their name was, so quickly Nikita would have failed a test five minutes later.

"We owe you a debt of gratitude for saving Claudia and Gigi," Mr. Giles said.

"Of course," Nikita said. "How long have you been having problems with the Russian mob?"

"Until now, I wasn't aware we were," he said. "Any of you?"

Robin said, "We knew that the drug-dealing demons had Russian contacts, but we didn't even think they might be part of organized crime. But now that we know -"

"I'd be very careful," Nikita said. "Gigi and Claudia showed me how fast they were, but I'm betting you can't outrun bullets. And if they're pissed at you for interfering in their drug trade, they won't stop."

"We may need to do something about this," Mr. Giles said. "Sooner, rather than later. I believe we must call a war council. Xander, what did Willow's dread devices show?"

Who was Willow and what were her dread devices?

"Well, Nikita here's apparently dead. She was executed for murder about a decade ago. But -" he said over the budding objections of Robin and Mr. Giles, "That jibes with what she told Faith, except she didn't actually tell us what she'd done or that she was supposed to be dead." Since he said this while looking into a phone, Nikita guessed that the dread devices were some kind of high-level computer search tool. Division had something similar. That would make Willow the Academy's version of Birkhoff.

"She ain't a vamp, I can tell you that much," Faith said.

Xander said, "And I'm not getting a whole lot otherwise. No official records since her 'execution.' I'm sure Wills could go deeper but I've hit my limit." After a second, "There's a few places that mention 'Division,' and it basically sounds like it's run by the same type of charming folks who ran the Initiative, only with fewer monsters. So yeah, that jibes too."

The Initiative, the Initiative . . . Nikita'd heard Amanda mention it once . . . she couldn't place it now. "That's Birkhoff. He'll be happy to know he's done such a good job."

"But can we trust her?"

"She saved my life!" Gigi said. Of course, that was no indicator. But while Nikita knew she'd gone after the Russian mobsters because it was the right thing to do, for all Mr. Giles and these people knew she'd set this situation up specifically to earn their trust. She was honestly surprised she'd been told this much, but she figured that they thought there was no point concealing what she already knew, and as for the part about the history of the Slayers, the part that had had Xander cracking up, it's not like she could use that for blackmail even if she wanted to. Damn few people would believe it.

So she was expecting Mr. Giles to thank her again and send her on her way. And she would be fine with that.

Instead, he told Xander, "Contact Willow, if you would, and ask her to handle the further search personally. Nikita, as we do not typically deal with purely human organizations on a regular basis, any advice you can offer us would be appreciated. Gigi, Claudia, your presence would also be appreciated."

"As for the rest of you," Xander said. "You know the rules. You don't have to go back to your rooms, but you can't stay here." There were some muted grumbling, but within a minute or so the entryway was empty of all but her, Xander, Robin, Mr. Giles, Faith, Claudia and Gigi.

Mr. Giles pointed down the hall. "Shall we?"

X

There weren't quite as many people in the lobby this time around: Mr. Giles, Robin, Gigi, and Claudia. Claudia was in a wheelchair. There was also a red-haired woman Nikita didn't recognize.

Grinning, Gigi said, "Hi, Nikita!" Her smile reached her eyes, but she had the look of someone who'd been beaten – though not beaten down. She was an inch or so taller and her hair seemed to be back to its natural brown. Claudia seemed largely the same as Gigi. Everyone else looked like they had four years ago, only four years older.

Claudia then said, "Hello there." She sounded happy to see Nikita, anyway.

"Nikita," Xander said, "You remember everyone?"

"Everyone I've met before," she said.

"Right," the redhead said, stepping forward. "Because how could you be expected to remember someone you've never actually met? I mean, without using a memory spell, and those, very definitely not good. Hi. I'm Willow Rosenberg, and boy, Xander, you weren't kidding."

Everything Willow had said had taken maybe five seconds. Wondering what Xander had said, Nikita shook Willow's hand and said, "Nikita. Nice to meet you. So, you're their Birkhoff."

"Well, it's more true that Birkhoff is your me, but damn, he's one of the best hackers I've ever seen. He really is almost as good as me, and that, not me being an egotist, trust me. His walls are thick enough that it took me longer to get through them than it's taken me to get through anywhere else, and that's how we found out what Division really was back then. They were a bunch of assholes."

"At least we can say were now," Nikita said. "Mostly."

"This Amanda, right?" Robin asked.

"Right."

"And boy were her details buried deep," Willow said. "I couldn't even find a picture of her. I know she thinks she's an expert in everything from child psychology to psychopharmacology, though."

"Would her real name help?"

"It's not Amanda?" Willow asked.

"No. It's Helen Collins. She had a sister named Amanda."

Willow said, "Okay. I can do something with that. Thanks."

"Thank you." To everyone else, she said, "You're sure there's not going to be a problem?"

"Our organization is far more informal," Mr. Giles said. "And besides, should I be so presumptuous as to order Faith not to do something for any reason short of an imminent apocalypse, I dare say she would not take it well."

"And the rest of us just say how high when you say jump?" Gigi said. "Well, except for Claudia here."

"You think I can't chase you down in this thing, Pinky?" Claudia asked merrily.

"I think I win as soon as I find a tree."

"You're on." And without warning Claudia wheeled herself towards Gigi hard enough that Nikita would have broken her arms.

After they were out of sight, Nikita asked, "What happened?"

"To Claudia?" Xander asked. "It's a long story. But you get credit for her being in that chair."

"What?" Nikita asked, in shock.

"You get the _credit_," Faith said. " Not the blame. Wasn't for you she'd be dead. Let me explain . . ."


	5. Bang and Blame

Awakened from a dream of a rabbit in a burning forest, Amanda picked up her phone on the second ring. The clock read 2:42. As she had given instructions to the mercenaries to call her at any hour if there was news about Nikita or any of her hangers-on, there was no irritation in her voice when she said, "Yes?"

"We found two of 'em." This from Panos, who was their leader.

"Where and who?"

"Central Maryland. An Arby's. Michael and Alex. They were talking with the closing crew. They left with the security tapes. A couple of my people are following 'em."

"Why didn't you try to take them?" Amanda asked, irritably.

"You've told me they're really good. Two on two and my guys get killed."

"I'm paying you well."

"Very well. Still not enough for my guys to commit suicide. I was going to wait for numbers. Anyway. You want to know why they were here? Because it wasn't for the roast beef. Though it's good roast beef." He sounded like he was eating one of the sandwiches while he was talking.

"Yes. Tell me."

"They were looking for Nikita. She was here late yesterday."

"Really." Amanda's mind was already whirring. Maybe, just maybe, she could turn the mercenaries' error into a positive thing. If Michael and Alex were looking for Nikita, then let them. Either they would lead the mercenaries to Nikita, or back to where the others were hiding, and either way, only good things could happen for Amanda. (Even if they managed to overcome the mercenaries, it was a good outcome, albeit only for Amanda: as Nikita and her allies tended to respond to lethal force with lethal force, then that would be thousands of dollars she wouldn't have to pay out.)

"Yes. And the cashier told us that Nikita apparently met someone. She drove away with them also. Cashier couldn't tell us anything else. They wouldn't let her see the tape. And don't worry. The staff and customers won't be able to describe us."

The Shop didn't have the influence Division did, but they had enough to guide the ensuing police investigation into "robbery gone bad" territory, so that was nothing to worry about it. She told Panos to continue to track Michael and Alex and to let her know when they seemed to have either gone to ground or caught up with Nikita, and they would go from there.

"Be ready to attack?" Panos asked.

"Yes. But hold off on actually doing it unless they attack you first."

"That is my general rule."

He then hung up, which bothered Amanda not in the least; she only used pleasantries when they were necessary.

So. Nikita on the run. That was a bit more off balance than Amanda was strictly comfortable with. Knowing Nikita and her concern for others the way she did, Amanda was convinced that she had gone solo because she was attempting to protect her friends.

This would never do. Amanda wanted Nikita to know the torment of feeling her friends ' pain. She must be taught that loving others, caring for them, only brings about your own suffering. She had been attempting to teach this lesson for over twenty years now, and she would make it clear to Nikita.

She almost hoped that Michael led Panos' forces back to their safe house.

Then Nikita would learn the lesson.

X

Not sounding happy – Faith couldn't blame her – Nikita said, "How is Claudia being in a wheelchair something I deserve credit for?"

"Come on. I'll show you."

They walked down the hall. Nikita said, "Show?"

"Yeah. Showing's better than telling, sometimes." They stopped in front of the weapons locker. "Grab my hand," she told Nikita.

Nikita did so. "Lehane. She's with me."

The door opened inwards. Nikita jumped back, and if Faith hadn't had Slayer strength she probably would have wrenched her left arm from its socket. "What the hell – I didn't even see that there."

"You wouldn't. Spell blocks anyone who doesn't have the right to go in there from even seeing the door. And if you tried going in now, you'd wake up in five minutes lying on the floor with a wicked headache and no idea what the hell you were doing here. That's why you gotta hold my hand."

"Okay." Nikita knew about magic – she'd made that clear the first time they met – but she didn't know shit about it, which she'd also made clear, and they hadn't dealt with all that much magic then, either.

X

Faith was the last one into the war room; Giles, Robin, and Xander were already sitting down, but Gigi and Claudia were damn near bouncing off the walls. Sure. They'd narrowly missed being killed tonight and they hadn't had the chance to work anything off. Well, that would change soon enough. Faith whistled and said, "Yo! Pinky! C! You don't have to sit down, but stand still, would you? You're making Nicky nervous."

Nicky looked to be about to say something, but then she looked at Faith and looked to have tumbled to what Faith was doing, so she kept her mouth closed.

"Very well, then," Giles said. "Let's start, shall we. Claudia? Report."

"Well, you know we've been trying to track down whoever's been shipping the Atropos in, and a couple of days ago we finally caught a break and found a buy in progress. We stopped them, told the buyer – a Burchell's – to get lost – and got the dealer to tell us who his supplier was. The supplier took more work -"

"Man, those Gennora have tough skin," Gigi said. No joke; you couldn't cut 'em with anything less than a chainsaw, but a few whacks upside the head worked fine. The girls weren't supposed to drift to outright torture, but a few threats and a "demonstration" of things to come if they didn't talk, usually got them to talk.

"Yeah. Took us a while, but we learned of a buy going down tonight at the golf course, and, well, you guys know the rest."

"Can I ask a question?" Nikita asked.

Xander said, "Go right ahead. We're not all that formal around here."

"Despite my best efforts," Giles said.

"Thanks. When you think about it, does it seem like they gave up the info a little too easily?"

Gigi said, "Yeah, now that we look back on it."

"We thought it was just our reputation." They both sounded like they blamed themselves. Well, fuck that. It was something you wanted to learn from, yeah, but that was something the folks in charge should've caught. They're the ones who screwed up.

Nikita nodded. "It was a trap from the start. This wasn't just an attack of opportunity. Mr. Wood, you said you already knew there were Russians involved, right?"

Robin said, "Right. We never got a hint of the mob being involved, though. The two worlds don't intersect all that often. Usually, demon mobs stick with demon mobs, and humans with humans."

"The Russian mob doesn't respect boundaries. They see a niche they're not exploiting, they're going to go after it. And if you get in their way, they'll do whatever they have to to move you. Setting this up was a way of making sure you knew they meant business."

"We know that now," Xander said. "The thing is, we mean business too."

"I'm sure you do," Nikita said. "But are you willing to wipe them out to make your point? Because you might have to."

"We don't kill humans unless there's no other choice," Faith said.

"With the Russian mob, you may not have one," she said. "Look, you want me to take care of them for you? Because I don't like killing people either but I'll do it if I have to."

After a few seconds, Giles said, "No. That would be hypocritical of us, to scorn the unnecessary taking of life while enlisting another who has fewer qualms to do it for us. I would still prefer to minimize the casualties. Perhaps a magical solution?"

"We'll have to check with the witchy contingent," Xander said. "I'm sure they could come up with something."

Nikita said, "What are you thinking?"

"We're thinking something that will scare them into stopping," Giles said. "Something more than the promise of physical violence. Something that will make them think that taking us on is unprofitable."

"I'm not sure something like that exists," Nikita said.

"You don't know magic," Faith said. "Ain't saying it's guaranteed to work. But it might. It's worth a shot."

"If you want my help, though, you have it." She shook her head. "I don't like seeing people trying to kill kids. Even kids who can take care of themselves the way you all can." And if she was bullshitting, then she blew her and Angel's skill as an actor out of the water. Yeah, she was a spy, so she was a trained liar, but Faith's gut said Nikita was on their side.

"We welcome the help," Robin said.

Claudia then said, "Still, shouldn't we be ready in case we run into them again before we're ready to try Operation Make them Piss Their Pants? We don't usually deal with people with guns."

"Really?" Nikita asked.

"Yup," Xander said. "It's a pride thing. We've run across a couple who've cheerfully blasted away, but we think saying, 'I killed a Slayer with an AK-47' doesn't really give you bragging rights."

"We give some training," Giles said. "But minimal, as we so rarely run across armed demons."

"I can help you there," Nikita said. "First rule in dealing with someone with a gun pointing it at you is to figure out whether you think they're going to kill you no matter what. In the case of the Russian mob, that's practically guaranteed even if they don't do it right away. So if you think they're going to shoot you anyway, don't just stand there and let them do it. You may not have much chance, but you've got none if you don't move."

"Got it," Gigi said. "Thanks." Gigi was usually chipper and upbeat, but she was listening to Nikita like she was hearing the gospel straight from God on high. Claudia didn't quite look like she was listening to the voice of God, but she was definitely paying attention.

Nodding, Robin said, "I think we'll take you up on that as well. But not tonight. Even Slayers need some sleep."

"And I'm not a slayer," Xander said. "I don't get my two hours a night, I'm no good the next day."

"'sides,' Faith said. "We all know Andrew'll be up at the crack of dawn."

"Andrew?"

"Magic user, cook, front desk guy, and pain in the ass, not necessarily in that order," Xander said. "He's a good guy overall, but don't tell him what you are or you'll never hear the end of it. Also, don't eat anything he cooks you haven't heard of before. He's good on the basics, but when he tries experimenting, he rusts out cast iron stomachs."

"I appreciate the warning," Nikita said. "I can just head back –"

"What you've said, Nicky, you ain't exactly living it up at the Ritz," Faith said. "You got anything there you're gonna miss?" She shook her head. "Good. Then you can sack out here. Xan, what've we got in the way of spare cottages?"

"The one to the right of Willow's is open," Xander said immediately.

"Am I allowed to leave?" Nikita asked suspiciously.

"Of course," Giles said.

Nikita studied Giles' expression carefully, and apparently figuring that they weren't planning on screwing her over, said, "Sure, then. I'd be happy to."

The meeting broke up, and Faith and Xander took Nikita to her cottage.

X

"Here it is," Faith said, and picked up a Glock from a rack. There were only a few handguns on the rack, and a couple of rifles along the wall. That was it for firearms. "This is the weapon one of the Russians shot Claudia with." Faith usually called her C.C., but there was no point in confusing Nikita.

"I thought we got all of them. And – trophies?"

"We got most of them," Faith said. "And these ain't trophies. What we got in here is the shit that's too dangerous for us to have on a regular basis. Most of this stuff we grabbed from the bad guys after they weren't using it anymore. Same's true for the Glock. Remember what you said first meeting we had about the Russians? You said if they're going to shoot you anyway, you might as well give them a moving target."

"I remember," Nikita said.

"It saved her life. One of the mob guys pointed it at her, far enough away that even Slayer reflexes wouldn't've helped her disarm the guy – and she moved. Bullet that would've gone through her skull went through her neck instead. Distracted everyone enough that everyone else got clear without getting hurt. And we haven't had a problem with the Russians since. So yeah, Claudia's in the wheelchair. Even Slayer healing ain't getting her out of it. And yeah. _You get the credit_. Got it?"

"Got it," Nikita said.


	6. Start at the Top

Sonya was taking a quick break, while Birkhoff, with the help and hindrance of Ryan Fletcher, tried to find out what he could about the couple who'd picked up Nikita.

Ryan was a hindrance because what he knew about cracking and hacking he could physically fit onto a microchip and still have plenty of room left, but a help because he had the freshest eyes of any of them, and because, unlike the rest of them, he wasn't listed as "shoot on sight and burn the remains" by the administration. Whatever contacts Ryan had weren't helping identify the people, though with nothing but physical description and his lack of access to face recognition software there wasn't a lot to go on, anyway. You'd think a man with an eyepatch would be easier to trace, but no luck so far.

The SUV was easier to trace, at least superficially. It was registered as belonging to a company called WSI – but WSI's main headquarters was in London, England, and the vehicle had Maryland plates. When he tried to get into WSI's records beyond the most basic level, he hit a stone wall. Not only could he not get in, after about two minutes a message popped up on his screen saying, "Boy, howdy, did you pick the wrong company to hack into."

It was signed "ScWi." And if that wasn't the infamous Scarlet Witch, then whoever it was was taking their life in their hands, and Birkhoff, under the circumstances, preferred not to make assumptions, and backed out, closed all the programs, and powered both computers down.

"What the hell?" Ryan asked. Birkhoff explained about the Scarlet Witch, and Ryan said, "But you're also at the top of the game, right?"

While Birkhoff appreciated the vote of confidence, this wasn't quite the right time for it. "Of course. But I'm working with a pair of laptops and a handful of programs, here. If you even gave me the stuff I had when I was on the run with Nicky, I'd go at it with anyone. But under the circumstances, I'm not going to risk trashing what little I have. It'd be like you going up barehanded against a wolfpack. No offense, dude, you're a badass, but you try that and odds are you're going down. When I go back in –" he turned the computer back on and kept a careful eye on it as it started – "I'm not even going to get close to trying to hack in to WSI's servers."

"Okay," Ryan said. "I get you. So how about trying to track them down through the SUV?" No, Ryan definitely wasn't stupid.

"Hacking into the MVA is what put me onto WSI in the first place," Birkhoff said.

"So who sold them the SUV? They'd have to have records."

"Huh. Good idea." The computers seemed to be undamaged – a quick "systems check" didn't show anything wrong – so he followed Ryan's advice.

Sonya stretched – Birkhoff watched (hey, they were dating) – as she walked in the room. Birkhoff explained what was going on. She said, "Does WSI have a regular website?"

"That's where I started digging," Birkhoff said, "And about a minute later's when I got the warning."

She was nodding her head. "Okay. Then I won't try that again."

"What are you thinking?" Ryan asked, stepping over to her.

"I'm thinking we might be overcomplicating things," she said, typing quickly. "Sometimes the answers we need are hidden right in plain sight."

"Google?" Ryan asked.

Birkhoff laughed.

Ten minutes later, Ryan stepped back to take a call from Michael and Alex, right as Birkhoff was about to crack the car dealer's records. When he came back a couple minutes later, and said, "They're getting nowhere just driving around."

Refraining from asking exactly what Michael and Alex thought they were going to accomplish by driving around asking questions in the middle of the night – it was pure luck he'd run across the right security camera footage in the first place, and they could've taken Nikita halfway to Pittsburgh in the time since – Birkhoff just said, "Tell them to sit tight for a minute or so longer, and . . . got it!"

"What have you got?" Ryan said, moving to stand behind him.

"The name of the person who purchased the SUV – flat out, they didn't finance it – with a WSI credit card. Say hello to Mr. Robin Wood."

"That would be," Sonya said, "Mr. Robin Wood, Dean of Students at the Unbroken Academy, in Warren, Maryland."

"Just had to show me up, didn't you?" Birkhoff asked.

"It's all I live for." Frowning, she continued, "It doesn't give a street address, though."

"I got this one," Ryan said, leaning forward and typing on Sonya's computer.

"Really?" Birkhoff said.

And Ryan laughed. "Of course. I'm not a computer whiz like either of you are, but I know one thing:" He swung the screen around so Birkhoff could see it. A popup saying "The Unbroken Academy: Warren, Maryland" and a letter A right on top of what otherwise looked like a collection of abandoned buildings. "You can't hide anything from Googlemaps."

X

Amanda hadn't bothered returning to bed, figuring on Panos to give another call sometime during the night or early morning. At Division, she had frequently had to get by on insufficient sleep, so this was no different. She texted some of the people at the Shop, to inform them that she had a lead on Nikita and, barring an extreme emergency, she would greatly appreciate being left to handle the current situation without the interruption of Shop business. She expected no objections, and indeed, received none. That the people at the Shop tended to keep more regular business hours than Division may, of course, have had something to do with that.

And indeed, about an hour after she and Panos had ended their previous conversation, he called back. "They're on the move again. They were driving around in circles. Now they seem to be going somewhere. The girl just got a call on her phone. They're headed east into Baltimore County. Any further instructions? The guys're getting antsy."

Amanda, of course, could not possible have cared less how antsy Panos' "guys" were getting, except if it got to the point of outright mutiny – and that clearly wasn't the case. For a mercenary, Panos was astonishingly guileless. If his people had been on the verge of open revolt, he would have made that clear. "No, nothing additional until they actually appear to have found Nikita. Once you have, you can get ready to attack – but wait for my order to actually do it, understood?"

Panos said, "I understand. We'll wait for your signal."

"Do you have any hint as to when that will be?" she asked.

"Could be ten minutes. Could be a couple hours," Panos said. "Depends where in Maryland they're headed. Randallstown would be ten minutes. Ocean City would be a good three to four hours."

Maybe she could manage to get some sleep, after all.

"Wait until you're in position before you call me."

"You're the one with the cash."

And then, dead air.

Amanda promptly dimmed the lights, put her phone by her bedside, and attempted to return to sleep. There was no point in dawdling.

X

As they left the weapons locker, Faith said, "I'm guessing you're to keyed up to sleep right now?"

Nikita honestly didn't know what time it was, past "night." But Faith was right, and she said as much.

"Come on, then. The cafeteria's open 24-7. Slayers don't exactly keep to fixed schedules."

There was no one in the cafeteria when they got there, but Faith grabbed a glass and got herself a soda, then poured herself a bowl of dry Lucky Charms. Nikita got a glass of water, but her stomach was still too twisted up for her to think about eating anything else. She'd practically had to force down the roast beef sandwich she'd eaten, and she'd done that only because she had to eat _something_.

After a few minutes while Faith scarfed down the cereal like she hadn't eaten in days, Nikita asked her: "I thought we got all the Russians. I was sure of it."

"Yeah, so were we," Faith said. "But it was the first guy you grabbed."

"I remember," Nikita said.

FLASHBACK

Nikita didn't get a lot of sleep – it took a lot for her to feel completely safe anywhere – but she woke up at 8 the next morning. She didn't have a change of clothes with her, and they hadn't provided her with one, but there were a basic supply of toiletries in the cottage's bathroom, so she at least got a shower and got to clean herself up.

She entered the main building and followed the signs to the cafeteria. There were a handful of people in it, but she only recognized one of them: Xander. The room was set up like a college dining hall. She grabbed a tray, got some eggs from the wide-eyed young man behind the serving line, and got some coffee and orange juice –

Then turned around to see Xander standing in the way of two girls she didn't recognize, both of whom were looking at her with murderous intent. She quickly put the tray down and readied herself for fight or flight, if necessary.

It wasn't. "She's a guest," Xander hissed. "How do you think she got into the building?"

One of them asked, "You know what happened to Trinh!"

"Yeah," Xander said. "And we made it so nothing like that can happen again."

"You could've asked," one the girls who was sitting at a table nearby said. "We were there when she came in."

"Better safe than sorry," the other standing girl said.

"Holly, LaShawn, sit down," Xander said firmly. "I'm glad you noticed; top marks. Now try to listen when people are talking to you, okay?"

The two women both mumbled, "Okay," before sitting back down. Xander then turned to Nikita and said, "Come on over," and patted the table across from him. Feeling every eye in the room on her – most not visibly hostile, thankfully – she walked over and sat down.

While peppering her eggs, Nikita said, quietly, "What was that about?"

"No need to whisper," Xander said. "A low-level form of superhearing comes with the Slayer package. They can't hear grass grow, but everyone in the room'll be able to hear what you say if they're being rude and listening in no matter how quiet you are." Nikita nodded and filed the information away. "Anyway, a couple of months back one of our enemies basically mind-controlled Trinh – one of our Slayers – into giving him access to everything in the building. We managed to stop him, but Trinh and one of the instructors died in the process. We've upgraded security since then, but some of the people are still gun-shy around anyone they've never seen before."

"Okay. I get that," Nikita said. "Thank you." That was horrible, both for Trinh and everyone else. When she found the right person to use as her agent on the inside, she vowed, she'd make sure they went in knowing exactly what was going on – and without being brainwashed, blackmailed, or extorted into doing it."

"You're welcome," was the answer.

"When I was trying to go to bed last night, I had an idea about how to handle your situation," Nikita said. "Not the magic part – I don't know the first thing about that." Well, technically, she did know the first thing, but that first thing was "If you see it, run," so she wasn't really lying. She didn't know how to use it or how to stop it. "But I'm guessing that in order to work whatever magic they're planning on they're going to need to know where they are. And the way Claudia and Gigi did it last time nearly got them killed."

"You think they might set up another trap?"

"Yeah, I do."

Xander shook his head. "They've got the local demons more afraid of them than they are of us. I'm thinking we're going to need to do something about that." He took a sip of soda, and then said, "What's your idea?"

"Start at the top."

"You want to go after the guy in charge?" Xander asked. "Won't he be surrounded by, you know, guys with guns?"

"Well, maybe not the top, top," Nikita said. "But high enough that they feel safe – and high enough that they won't be part of any potential traps. Then take them – somewhere, not here – and interrogate them until they tell us what we need to know."

Nodding, Xander said, "Okay. I get where you're going. One thing. Do you mean torture?"

And this was a minefield. "Define 'torture.' Flay him alive? No." Xander winced at that. Why? "Waterboarding? No. That kind of torture only gets people to tell you what you want to hear."

"You're thinking mind games, then." She'd learned that well, with Amanda, who was the absolute master of psychological interrogation. Of course, Amanda took pleasure in it, Nikita was sure of that. And Nikita never would. This was the kind of thing you did only till you got what you needed out of it. Anything more made you a monster.

"I am."

Out of the blue, Xander asked, "You done?"

Nikita had maybe a couple of bites of egg remaining, so – "Yes. Why?"

"Because there's no time like the present," Xander asked.

"I was going to do this by myself," Nikita said. "And –"

"And if you were going to ask for help, you'd ask one of the super-strong chicks?" Xander asked. "I get that. But they're Slayers, and Slayers don't kill or hurt others unless there's no other choice. You, me? We're not." Before Nikita could answer, he added, "Besides, you don't have a car, so unless you were planning on dragging him wherever you wanted . . .?"

She didn't bother mentioning that she'd planned on stealing one, if she had to. She also didn't bother mentioning that Xander wasn't exactly one for staying unmemorable.

She did mention that she wasn't sure of his combat skills.

"Well, I could challenge you to hand-to-hand in the squared circle, but that would leave us tired and bruised before we head out, and really, what sense does that make. Instead – ladies?" he stood up. The room got quiet. "Be honest, now. Am I any good as a fighter?"

"Dude, you take down demons and vampires," one of them said. "You couldn't take most of us, but that's not saying a lot."

"You ain't much on technique," LaShawn said. "But you kick ass in experience."

"Any naysayers? You won't get in trouble -" No one said anything. "Okay, thanks. Now, how am I as a dancer?" An explosion of "You stink!" and "You suck!" filled the room. He nodded. "Thanks. You may now return to your regularly scheduled breakfast, already in progress." Then, to Nikita, he said, "Good enough?"

She nodded. "Good enough. Let's go."

END FLASHBACK

"Anyway," Faith said, finishing up her cereal, "Enough of that. We've got a bad guy to track down, and Red's probably already figured her address, cell phone number, and how many times she's had sex in the last six months. Ready to look?"

"Sure," Nikita said. "Let's go."


	7. Get Back

A quick knock on Willow's cottage door got an "it's open" in response. Faith opened the door, and she and Nikita walked in.

"Hey, Red," Faith said. "What's going on? Found out anything more about Amanda yet?"

"Sure! Got her early life mapped out, anyway. She kind of disappears after college – I don't suppose you know the last name she used after that?" she asked Nikita.

Nikita wasn't. "I don't think I've ever heard anyone even talk about it," she said. "She was always just 'Amanda,' and she never said anything about her past that any of us could pin down. She lied all the time."

"She was telling the truth about being Helen Collins," Willow said. "I think."

"Let me see," Nikita said, and there on the screen was a newspaper story from 30+years ago mentioning how the Collins family, with the exception of young Amanda, was killed in a house fire. The home was in a suburb of Los Angeles. There was a slightly blurry black-and white picture of a young Amanda, who looked nothing like her grown-up self. "Yeah, that matches what she told me." The difference in appearance was probably plastic surgery – which would also explain why she was older than she looked. She had to be 50 at the youngest, and she looked to be somewhere in her early '40s.

"Found some college records," Willow said. "She went to the same college my mother did. She got straight A's."

"Of course she did," Nikita said.

"This is nice, Red, but how about figuring out where she is now?" Faith asked.

"No luck yet," she said. "And even magic needs something to go on. If I tried looking for Amanda NLN, even with her physical description, it'd be like looking for a specific needle, in a field full of haystacks made completely out of needles. She couldn't have chosen another first name?"

Realizing that the last question wasn't meant to be answered, Nikita ignored it and said, "She disappears after college?"

"Yup. The last record I have of Amanda Collins anywhere is when she graduated from medical school."

"She'd changed her name once, it wouldn't surprised me if she did it again," Nikita said.

"Probably. That doesn't help us find her now, unfortunately. But I'm just getting started. It'd be better if I didn't have to fight off someone trying to hack into our server, but they've given up."

"Who'd be dumb enough to try to break in here?"

"Birkhoff," Nikita said. "I'm not saying it's him, and I'm not saying he's dumb. But he's one of the best computer people in the world. But he wouldn't have given up. If the security here's as good as what they had at Division –"

"Better," Willow said. "And me, not much with the modesty when it comes to my hacking and cracking abilities."

"Then, if it's him, he's probably trying to find another way to track me down." A bit sadly, she said, "These are my friends. They think I'm wrong to want them out of danger, so they're going to try and find me."

"Took me a long time to get this," Faith said, "But that's what friends do. They don't want you to get hurt either." Nikita got that. Still. There was a reason.

"They can still be saved. I've been set up for killing the president," Nikita said. "I'm screwed no matter what."

"Hey!" Willow said sharply. "We don't do kamikaze round here, missy."

"Don't worry," Nikita said. "I'm not planning on killing myself." She thought it would probably happen, her death, and she was willing to die to take down Amanda, but she didn't actually want to die. So she wasn't exactly lying.

"Better not had," Willow said.

"And be gentle with Birkhoff," Nikita said. "He's trying to look out for me. Don't destroy his computer or anything."

"I won't." Willow turned back to the computer.

Faith snorted. "I think Red's telling us to leave."

"Was I unclear?" Willow said, but she was smiling.

They left the room. "I don't think there's anything else we can do tonight," Nikita said. "Tomorrow I'll see if I can reach out to whatever of my own contacts I don't think would turn me in."

"You want to try to grab some shuteye?"

"I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep, but I should probably at least try."

"Okay. Cottage you stayed in last time good?"

"Good enough," Nikita said.

Faith led her there, and left. Nikita tossed and turned.

FLASHBACK

Xander was sporting a pair of dark glasses, which concealed his eyepatch. They'd stopped by where she'd been staying, changed her clothes and gotten her stuff, and were now driving through suburban Baltimore County. "Do you know where you're going?" she asked.

"I know where Pinky and Claudia found their source; I figure we can start there, and then you can do your thing," he said. "The only thing I have over you is that I know the area and the locals better. Getting information and snatching people's more in your line of work. We don't usually take captives. We either kill, or we pound and warn, or we leave alone."

Nikita nodded. "I understand." Her work didn't involve a lot of pounding and warning, but she'd done plenty of the other two, and she'd done her share of body snatches. She usually knew which body to snatch in advance, but she'd done enough figuring out where to go to next in our time at Division that that wasn't a major problem. (For all that Division, and Percy in particular, liked the agents to be as close to robots as possible, even he'd realized that there were times you had to give the field agent some rope.)

A few minutes later, Xander pulled the SUV into a grocery store parking lot. "They're here?" Nikita asked.

"No, they're a couple of blocks away. I was thinking of not giving them a look at the license plate."

"Okay. That'll work for now, but once we move our way up the chain a quick getaway's going to be more important than not having them be able to see what we're driving." It wasn't a bad line of thinking for an amateur, though.

"You're the boss," Xander said. "Come on. It's this way." He then described the place, and by the sound of it, it was basically a demon coffee shop.

He led her down one block, left across most of another, and then into the parking lot and around the back of a small shopping center. "Front's closed this time of day, of course," he said. "Nothing in here opens before 10. In front, this place is a smoke shop anyway."

"You've been here before," she said, meaning Xander himself.

"Yup. It's a good place for information. We don't really care about low-level demon sleaze – if demons want to smoke some weed or gamble, we don't really care. This drug makes some demons go berserk and start trying to tear holes in anything or anyone in their way. But they make good sources."

Scouting the area, Nikita saw a car down the alley that had its engine running. As Xander was about to turn towards the back of the coffee shop, she grabbed his arm and said, quietly, "Keep walking."

"What – oh." He saw the same thing Nikita had, and walked right along with her. "Everyone's closed. The coffee shop shut down at dawn, so everyone inside but the owners have gone home. And they live there." That, Nikita hadn't known, but it didn't change her line of thinking. "So now, what do we do?"

"For the moment, we walk right by the car like we're taking a shortcut to work," Nikita said. "We look inside and smile, and we keep going."

Xander nodded, and started talking about the Baltimore Ravens. She frowned; this was the problem working with amateurs, sometimes; they wanted to do too much. Still, she could work with it. "I told you, Joe," she said. "I don't care about football. American football, anyway."

Rolling his eyes like he was in the middle of a 3 Stooges routine, he said, "Oh great. More about how a 1-0 game that ends in penalty kicks is so great. REAL sports play till someone wins, or they suck it up and take the tie. Hey, how you doing?"

That, he said to the man in the driver's seat, who glared, then leered when he saw Nikita, but he didn't say anything and turned back to look at the coffee shop's back door within a few seconds.

When they got to the end of the block, they turned the corner and Xander said, "So, did you get anything?"

"He didn't say anything, so I couldn't get a read on any accent, but if he's not Russian mob, I'd be surprised. So either he's a driver, or he's waiting for someone to get out so he can jump them." She thought. "Change of plans."

"You want to start with the driver?"

"Yeah. Here's what you do . . ."

Two minutes later Xander walked back and knocked on the car's passenger side window. The guy rolled down the window and said, "Go away," in a thick accent.

"I just wanted to ask you if you knew where the Starbucks was from here," he said. "My stupid girlfriend got me a job there and she swore this was a shortcut, and now she doesn't know where the hell we are."

"Don't know where the Starbucks is," the driver said. "Go away."

Nikita suddenly came up next to Xander and said, "Are you talking shit about me?"

"Well, if you knew where you were going—"

Nikita threw up her hands. "I can't believe this," she said. She leaned into the window. "Can you believe this? He blames me when it's his fault for not figuring out how to get there in the first place. I mean –" she pulled out her pistol and pointed at the driver. "Don't move."

The driver's eyes widened, and he said, "You are making a mistake."

"Ah, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, what's one more?" Xander said, looking down the block. "We're good."

Good. The driver's friends were still inside. "Left hand on the wheel. With your right hand, slowly take out the keys and hand them to me."

The driver moved his hand to the ignition switch, then abruptly reached for the shift stick. Nikita brought the barrel of the pistol down on his hand as hard as she could. She'd been expecting the driver to try something, but she didn't want to shoot him unless she had no other choice.

He grabbed for the weapon, but Nikita yanked it out of his way and said, "Try that again and it's a bullet."

The man cursed in Russian – calling her all sorts of names, none of which particularly bothered her – but took the keys and tossed them onto the seat. Xander grabbed them. Nikita moved around the front of the car, keeping the pistol trained on him at all times, and when she got to the other side, said, "Get out."

The man got out – Nikita stood clear of the opening door – and said, "There are much better cars for you to steal."

"We're not stealing the car," Nikita said. "We're stealing you." Then she smacked him in the back of the skull, and when that didn't knock him unconscious, hit him again.

That did it. He went down. Xander came over and kicked him in the back of the head again, just to be on the safe side, then picked him up and dumped him the passenger seat. "Got anything to tie him up with?"

"That'll have to wait," she said. "Look."

Two men had just came out of the back of the coffee shop, had looked down the street, and saw them . They took out their weapons. Nikita shot at them and they ducked to the pavement, then told Xander "GO!"

Xander didn't need to be told what to do. He'd already jumped into the driver's seat. Now, he started the car and floored the accelerator while Nikita was still climbing into the back seat.

"Reverse!" She yelled. "And get as far down as you can!" A bullet came through the front windshield, accenting her words.

Not bothering to answer her, Xander shifted to reverse, and sped backwards towards the end of the shopping center, stopping right before he was about to go over the curb. Then he pulled out and shot across the near-empty parking lot to the far entrance, pulled out into traffic, and slowed down. Looking back, Nikita saw the two men round the corner of the shopping center. She told Xander, "Don't go directly to our location."

"Got it," Xander said, and drove a few streets down before turning right and then right again, and pulling back into the parking lot. "Now could you tie him up?" he asked.

Smiling, Nikita did just that.

END FLASHBACK

Eventually, Nikita fell asleep.


	8. Not Exactly Bugs Meany

Birkhoff and Sonya had had a couple of hours to sack out – not that Michael or Alex were happy about this, but as he explained to them, they weren't going to be any good if they fell asleep in the middle of trying to turn off a security system.

Besides, he'd already told them where the Unbroken Academy was, thanks to Ryan's flash of insight, and they'd promised not to do anything more than look around until he had a chance to do more research.

Ryan, in the meantime, apparently didn't need to sleep, because he'd spent the last couple of hours talking to undoubtedly grumpy contacts, many of whom were probably trying to figure out where the hell he was – while he was still theoretically in good standing with the administration, that didn't mean people didn't want him answering a whole lot of questions. The president's murder helped them there, by distracting a whole lot of people, though that was a hell of a thing to find the good side of. Birkhoff hadn't voted for the woman – he'd never actually voted – but there was a hell of a difference between "I don't like your politics" and "I want you dead."

Did you find out anything?" Sonya asked Ryan when the two of them went back to the "computer room."

"A lot of people pretending not to know me," Ryan said, "Although the fact that I'm calling them at 4 in the morning might have had something to do with that." He stood up. "What I did find out was strongly in the direction of 'don't mess with these people,' with the occasional undercurrent of 'they're the good guys.' The best info I got came from a contact I've got on the NYPD, who said that some people from the Unbroken Academy helped them bring down a mass murderer not too long ago, and that a lot of the people involved in it were young women – from maybe 16 to mid-20s at most – and that these women could kick ass."

"You think we're dealing with another agency, then?" Birkhoff asked.

"I'm sure of it, though it sounds like they have different goals. Division doesn't – didn't – deal with stopping mass murderers, as a general rule."

"Well, we certainly had some on the payroll," Birkhoff muttered. "Back when Percy and Amanda were in charge, I mean." And they made deals with them all the time. Not people like Ted Bundy, but closer to those on the order of Osama bin Laden.

"Yeah. I know."

Sonya handed him a Pepsi Max and said, "Ready?"

"As I'll ever be," he said.

X

It was 5:36 in the morning when Amanda awoke to the sound of her phone ringing. She had been dreaming of superheroes. "Yes?" she said.

Panos, of course. "They've been sitting outside this place near Cockeysville for about an hour. They're eating and talking and looking at it. They're not doing anything else. Place looks like the entrance of an old nursing home. The sign on the outside says "Unbroken Academy."

"Anything else?" Amanda asked.

"No trespassing."

Almost anyone else, Amanda would have assumed they were trying to make a joke. Panos didn't know how. "I mean, are they doing anything else?

"Nothing we can see."

"And are you certain they're observing this – Unbroken Academy? Could they possibly just be planning strategy? Or sleeping?" She didn't doubt Panos' powers of observation, but she preferred not to have mercenaries attack an actual private school. It would be extremely difficult to cover up. So she asked.

"They've been sitting there for an hour," Panos said. "And they're not asleep. There's too much movement for them to be asleep. And they're taking notes. So I'm sure. Sure enough to bet my pay."

That was sure, for Panos. "Very well, then," she said. "Scout out this Unbroken Academy and let me know if you see Nikita. Only then will we be completely certain."

"Michael and Alex watching it isn't enough?"

"That means that that's where they believe Nikita is," Amanda said. "They are more than competent at this sort of thing, but so is Nikita. It is possible they have been fooled."

"We checked on the vehicle. It's registered to a company called SWI. When Mickey tried to hack their website he got a warning. Thirty seconds later something wiped his hard drive."

"SWI?" Amanda didn't particularly care about Mickey's computer, except that it indicated that whoever was in charge of computer security at SWI was good at their job.

"Yeah. Mean anything to you?"

It didn't, but Amanda, while well-read, never pretended to know everything. "No. But I'll have some of the people here do some research and get back to you."

"Will do."

He disconnected. It was now 5:41 AM. Surely someone at the Shop would be up, able to answer some questions or do something to find out who or what this SWI was, and what connection they had to the Unbroken Academy.

But first, a shower.

FLASHBACK

Nikita thoroughly bound and gagged the driver, and then tossed him in the SUV's back seat. In the meantime, Xander drove the car to the back of the supermarket and parked it behind a dumpster, then wiped down the steering wheel and the door latches, at her direction. "I'd hoped we could torch it," he said, apparently joking.

"That would only bring more attention."

"Which is the last thing we need. Yeah. So. Where to now?"

"Back to where I was hiding." She didn't want them tracing this directly to the Unbroken Academy.

"Got it. After we get there, I'll make a few calls."

They drove the rest of the way in silence—to avoid giving any hints to their captive, in case he woke up and decided to try to fake it.

At some point, he had, because when they got there and Nikita opened the back door, he kicked the door as hard as he could, knocking her off balance – but not enough to do him any good. Nikita pulled out the pistol as she staggered back, and had it trained on him before he could even get his (still-bound) feet on the pavement.

The man stopped. Xander said, "I don't suppose you have any handy-dandy chloroform lying around?"

"Nope," Nikita said. "We'll just have to keep hitting him."

The man realized what that meant and started flailing about, until Xander grabbed his thrashing feet and dragged him out of the car, letting his head bounce off the asphalt. This wasn't enough to knock him unconscious, but it took some of the fight out of him so that he was a lot easier to drag into the motel. There, they threw him onto the bed and Nikita said, "Okay, we're going to take off your gag. Yell and someone'll call the police – and I don't think you like them any more than we do." She gestured for Xander to do it, while she kept the pistol carefully trained.

He didn't scream, and he didn't try to attack Xander, but he clearly wasn't happy, and made sure they knew it in a stream of cuss words in at least three different languages, during the course of which he explained exactly what he would do to them and how painful it would be. The man had little or no imagination; she'd been threatened with far more inventive tortures in her time at Division, and that was just by Amanda.

While they waited for the man to run down, Xander left the room to make a phone call. Finally, the man ran out of things to say, and simply glared at her. "Are you done?" Nikita asked. The man spat. "Good. What's your name?" No answer. "Okay, then. The hard way it is."

When a minute later she hadn't moved, the man said, "This is the hard way? Unless you mean another kind of hard, and there you're already doing very well."

Nikita rolled her eyes but didn't say anything until Xander came back. "Okay, we got one coming," he said.

One what, Nikita wanted to, but didn't ask. "Okay. Good. I need you to help me. Our friend here isn't even telling us his name, so we need to get his wallet." The man backed up until his butt was up against the room's far wall.

"Maybe he's your friend," Xander said, moving forward. "I'm not friends with people who casually set up teenaged girls to be killed."

"I had nothing to do with that!" the man protested as Xander came forward, dragged him to the foot of the bed, flipped him over, and pulled the wallet out of his back pocket. He handed it to Nikita has he stepped backwards, not bothering to put the man back on his back.

"Vasily Abramov," Nikita read. There were also a couple of credit cards, a few hundred dollars in cash, and a blood donor card. "So, Vasily. You say you had 'nothing to do with that.'"

"I did not. I was at the Hustler Club."

"You obviously knew about it."

"Yes."

"So it's not that you wouldn't kill these women," Nikita said, "It's that you just weren't asked to."

"There's pretty much no way you can answer that that's going to make you look good," Xander said. "So don't even bother trying."

"Why would I? The girls were getting in the way of our business. They had to be taught a lesson." Nikita had seen this before. Vasily apparently thought he was dead anyway, so he wasn't going to bother lying – at least, not about things his captors already knew. And the way he said "Why would I" made it sound like he couldn't possibly see a reason anyone would object. Of course you killed those who got in your way; who wouldn't?

People like that ran Division. People like that were why she left Division, and was going to do her best to bring it down.

"And see how well that worked?" Nikita asked.

"We will simply try again," Vasily said, sneering.

"Yeah, one thing about us," Xander said. "We don't run scared from anyone."

"Then we will kill you all."

Xander laughed, though there was no humor in it. "Believe me when I say better than you have tried. People that make you guys look like Bugs Meany and the Tigers. We're still here. They're not."

Vasily was unimpressed, and said so.

"You don't need to be impressed," Nikita said. "You just need to tell me where your boss is."

"Whether I tell you or don't, you're going to kill me anyway. So I choose not to tell you." He said it with as much dignity as a man bound head to toe lying face down on a bed can have, which was very little.

"Doesn't matter anyway," Xander said. "We're not the interrogators." He opened the door and gestured. A blonde woman of medium height – maybe in her late 30s - came into the room. "She is. Vasily Abramov, lowlife Russian thug, meet Stephanie, like we're giving you her last name, witch. Steph? Go to it."

The woman smiled grimly as she stepped forward. "Just relax, Mr. Abramov," she said. "This won't hurt a bit."

END FLASHBACK

"What?" Amanda said. After her shower, she'd called in a request for someone in the Shop to tell her everything they could find about SWI and the Unbroken Academy. Ten minutes later, one of the board members, who sounded irritable at having been awakened at 6 in the morning, had called her back.

"I believe I was clear," the man said. "The Shop will have nothing to do with anything involving SWI. We will not prevent you from doing it, but we are beneath their radar and we would very much like to stay that way. Do not use any of our resources, either."

"This is to get Nikita," she said. "Which you all agreed to help me do."

"And we'll keep doing that, as soon as she's no longer connected to SWI. Their predecessor drove our predecessor out of business in a decidedly terminal fashion several years back and we have no interest in a repeat performance. We'll send you the information we have, internally, on SWI, but we won't research them any further."

"This is unacceptable."

"Maybe, but it's going to happen whether you accept it or not."

He hung up. She screamed in frustration, but didn't bother calling back; it wouldn't have done any good. Not thirty seconds later she got the signal that she was receiving an email. Attached was all the information they were willing to give her about SWI. She sat back on her bed and began to read it –

Wait.

That name. It couldn't be.

No, it was.

Well. This made things substantially more difficult.

X

Stephanie, whose last name is Samuels, is my creation. It couldn't be Willow; Nikita didn't meet her until the present.


	9. Leave No Witnesses

FLASHBACK

Vasily's eyes got wide as Steph approached, and he hunched up to the wall and began thrashing around. "You know," Steph said. "It's going to be a lot harder to do if he's thrashing around."

"I left the chloroform at home and I don't think we can just wait for him to fall asleep," Xander said. "So I guess we'll have to just hit him on the head again."

"It'll be a shame about the brain damage, but you can still do your job, right?" Nikita asked Steph. At this point she was playing along, improvising. Agents who couldn't think on their feet weren't agents for long.

"Well," she said. "Actually, that would be easier. If he's already damaged, then I won't need to worry about not hurting him myself. I can just go in there, rummage around, and come out with everything we need. And," she said cheerfully, "We can use what's left over to start a garden." A few seconds later, she added, "Because he'll be a vegetable. Get it?"

Groaning, Xander said, "Steph, as a comedian, you're a great witch. Of course," he said, "We can avoid all of that if he stops struggling."

Vasily wasn't buying it and kept trying to burrow into the wall. Stepping forward, Nikita said, "Xander, hold his legs, would you?" and, after Xander sat on the Russian's calves, Nikita simply shoved his face into the pillow.  
He struggled for about a minute, before finally lying still. Nikita stopped pushing, signaled for Xander to get up, and checked his breathing, just to be safe. She hadn't held him down long enough to kill him – they taught you the timing for that carefully, at Division, but there was always a chance of someone being extra sensitive.

Nope. Still alive.

"Steph? I think it's your show now."

And the witch moved forward, put her hands on Vasily's face, and began to chant.

After a minute, Xander came over and stood by Nikita. "We should probably sit down and watch some TV. This might take a while."

So they Sat, Nikita taking the chair, Xander the floor, and watched the news.

END FLASHBACK

The "trouble" alarm jolted Faith awake. She jumped out of bed and picked up the phone while she got dressed. "Talk to me, Andy," she said.

Deadly serious, Andrew said, "We've got multiple alerts of people watching us. They seem to be heavily armed and getting into position to attack."

"Shit. Any idea who?"

"No. But it's high-grade weaponry. Better than the Russians had."

Mercenaries. Shit. And ten to one they were after Nikita. "Wake Nicky," she said.

"Already done. Everyone's been alerted and told to move into the main building."

"Make sure it doesn't look like an alert. We don't want to let whoever's watching us know that we know they're out there."

"Hold on one second . . . Attention. This is Andrew. Everyone, walk, don't run, to the nearest entrance. Don't act like we're about to go on lockdown . . . sound good?"

"Good. G and Robin up?"

"Yes. They're already here."

"Okay," Faith said. "I'll be there in ten, unless people start shooting."

Then she finished getting dressed, loaded up on her personal weapons, and walked over to Nikita's cottage. Nikita was up and pacing. "What do you know?" Faith asked.

"This place is about to be attacked. So I need to get out of here."

"The hell you do." Faith knew Nikita's thinking; Willow called it the killdeer principle, after some bird. Give the bad guys someone to chase after, and lead 'em away from the chicks. They used it, but only when they had to. And Slayers weren't baby birds. "I know what you're thinking: They're after you, so they'll chase you. Right?"

"Right."

"You ain't wrong. But remember what Red said last night? We don't go in for kamikaze shit unless there's no other choice."

"I don't want you to get hurt. I know how good you are –"

"Nicky, with all due respect, that's a bunch of crap. When you were here the first time you didn't have a real chance to see us in action. I know you know we're good, but you ain't seen how good." After a second, "'sides, there's always a chance this is for us. Yeah, our enemies don't usually send in guys with high-powered weapons, but every once in a while someone gets creative."

Nikita glared at her. "You really think that's likely?"

Shrugging, Faith said, "Eh, probably not. But you came here for help, and you're going to get help. Now come on. And try not to look like you know there's a problem."

They left the cottage, laughing, and talked about breakfast. A couple of other Slayers and one of the junior Watchers were also heading in. When they were halfway to the main building, something whizzed by Nikita's head and bounced off the pavement. Fuck. Whoever was out there had at least one sniper.

"Everyone break for it!" Faith yelled as she and Nikita dove behind one of the cottages. Another shot rang out, then a third. Both were aimed where Nikita and Faith would have been if they'd kept running. Everyone else out there

"Still think they're after you?" Nikita asked.

"Hey, I've pissed a lot of people off in my day," Faith said. "Still could be me."

Nikita didn't bother answering. "Okay. They have us pinned."

"Not for long, they don't," Faith said. "Any day now!" she yelled out.

"Any day now, what?" Nikita asked.

"You'll see." A few seconds later a shot came through the back wall of the cottage – though not all the way through. "That's a relief," Faith said.

A few more shots hit the same general area. "I don't think so," Nikita said. "They're trying to punch a hole through the cottage. Just then, Willow came walking out of the main building – everyone else in sight had managed to make it inside. Get down!" Nikita yelled.

"Relax, Nicky," Faith said. "Red's got this."

The sounds of the gunfire hadn't stopped, but no bullets were hitting the back of the cottage. "Come on!" Willow said. "I can keep this up, but not forever!"

"Come on," Faith said, standing up. "Red's slowing down anything that comes in here faster than a human can run but it's got to be draining her something fierce." When Nikita hesitated, she said, "Look, Nicky. You came here for our help, right. Trust us on this. Okay?"

Nikita nodded. "Okay."

They left cover. While they could hear, in the distance, a couple of shots, nothing whistled by them or ricocheted off the sidewalk. One of the rifle shells came towards them at, maybe, a half mile per hour. Noticing it, Nikita stopped to take a look.

"Don't touch it," Willow said. "It's still got all of its kinetic energy and it'll probably rip a finger off or two and I'm thinking that, not a good thing."

Nikita pulled back, and looked at the shell without touching it. ".300 Winchester Magnum," Nikita said. "A popular choice."

"That tell you anything?" Faith asked.

"Walk and talk?" Willow said. "I'd hate to have my spell go to waste.

They hustled to the building. As soon as they were inside, Willow said, "This way," and they trotted down the hall.

"Well?" Faith asked.

"So far," Nikita said, "They've shown they're tactically smart, but strategically dumb, and that they have good equipment, but not top of the line. I'd say they're professional mercenaries, and probably skilled ones, but also not the best money can buy."

"Huh. Why strategically dumb?"

"I looked over towards the treeline, where the shots had to be coming from. They weren't doing anything I could see, and they weren't coming to attack the house. Good strategy calls for at least having a couple of backup plans in place. Instead, I'd bet they're back there, trying to figure out what to do. "That means they're likely to be skilled and trained, but probably not the absolutely best that can be found."

"Good to know."

Claudia came rushing towards them. "We have a situation by the front gate," she told Faith.

"What is it?"

"Holly caught a couple of people watching the front last night from a car. We were keeping an eye on then when the shots broke out."

"A couple more mercenaries?"

"If they are, they don't have anything to do with the guys shooting at us unless they're the best actors ever. When they heard the shots, they jumped , looked around, swore, and got out of the car, and dove for cover when someone started shooting at them."

"Where are they now?" Faith asked as they turned a corner.

"When Willow put her shield up," Claudia said, "They looked around, confused. Then the man – there was one man, one woman –"

Nikita swore. "Male about six feet tall, beard stubble, dark brown hair; woman about my height, lighter hair than the man, blue eyes?"

Screeching to a halt so fast that Willow ran into the back of her wheelchair, Claudia said, "Sorry," to her, and then to Nikita, "How did you know?"

"That's Michael and Alex," Nikita said. "How did they find me so fast?"

Shit. No wonder Nikita'd swore. Michael and Alex were two of the people she was trying to protect, and they'd found her already less than a day after she took off. And that made them the good guys. "Where are they now?"

They got going again. "The man saw one of the shells coming at him slower than a turtle, and said, "Damn!" Then he and the woman ran for the building, hands out."

"Didn't want us shooting at them," Faith said. "Nicky. Michael and Alex? They know about magic?"

Nikita said, "Michael yes, Alex no. They'd gotten away from training the recruits about things like that by that time, and instead told them to just back off and report anything that seemed weird, that someone else would handle it. If that's them, we have to get them inside."

"They already are," Claudia said, "They're being held in one of the old offices right outside the 'war room.' That's where we're headed now."

"Good," Nikita said. "By the way, Willow: Thanks for saving us back there."

"No problem," Willow said. "you're our guest, so letting you die, not good for the karma, and mean besides."

They got to the outside of the war room. Gigi came out, looking like she was ready to explode from nervous energy, and said, "We've spotted some of them. Squad two was sent out underground to try to surprise them. We've got crossbows on the roof if any of them try to sneak up, and Andrew's leading Steph and half the witches in reforming Willow's speed suppression field."

"Won't that affect the crossbows too?" Nikita asked.

"Good point," Faith said. Have them ready to drop it if the crossbow people want to fire."

"They probably won't be able to drop and reform it too much," Willow said. "That takes a lot out of you."

Faith nodded. "Okay. Make sure everyone knows that, and not to fire unless you're sure you have the shot. Lookouts on all sides?"

"Yes. All noncombatants are in the safe room and everyone else is armed and ready."

"Nicky? You think they'll try to invade?"

"If they can't snipe me, yeah, I do," she said.

"Nikita!" A voice came from behind a nearby door.

"Can I?" She asked.

"Sure," Faith said. "We got the attack for right now."

Faith nodded to the woman guarding the door , who stepped aside and let Nikita in.

X

No, Amanda thought, this would not do at all. Panos and his men were skilled, but they tended towards the "leave no witnesses" school of thought. Useful at times, but sometimes the situation called for a surgeon's scalpel rather than a chainsaw. Unfortunately, the chainsaw was all she had.

She hadn't had to read much of the data provided to realize exactly where Nikita had run to. SWI – whose initials stood for Slayer-Watcher International, or Scarlet Witch International, depending upon who was asked – was the successor to the Watcher's Council. It was no wonder the Shop had wanted no part of them. Amanda had no such luxury. Nikita had not run to SWI by accident; she was no doubt attempting to enlist their aid.

Whether she would get it was an open question, though the SWI, unlike its far more practical predecessor, seemed to regard itself as a do-gooder organization, and even though Amanda carefully had little to do with the supernatural – once was more than enough.

She'd been manipulated during that time, manipulated into actions she wouldn't have considered on her own, and that galled her. Amanda loathed being manipulated. She much preferred to be the manipulator, the one controlling everyone else's nightmares, rather than being caught up in them herself.

It was too late to back out now. However small a chance Panos and his cohorts might have, it was infinitely preferable to backing out, allowing Nikita to form her coalition, and having to face whatever might happen with no assistance from her erstwhile allies in the Shop. She had confidence in her abilities, but she was not fool enough to believe herself physically capable of facing off against SWI without assistance far superior to that even a skilled mercenary like Panos could provide.

Had she had the whole of Division on her side, she would have felt more secure – but Division was lost, and the "Dirty Thirty" were no more.

She called Panos and reminded him not to attack until she gave the order.

Panos sounded almost sheepish. "Too late for that."

"What?" Amanda asked angrily.

"One of the guys saw her walking towards the main building. He decided to take the shot. By the time I got there it was too late. Everyone was sprinting towards the building. They got Nikita pinned. She made it into the building."

Idiots! "I want her alive. Michael, Alex, them, you can kill. Nikita has to be alive." The dead did not suffer. The dead could not learn.

"Okay. What about everyone else?"

"I'm not paying you to kill or capture anyone else. That said, there's one other person I want you to not kill." She told them who it was.

"Will do. I have to go. They're putting people up on their roof."

And then silence.

Amanda thought. She might not be physically capable, but she was mentally capable. She took out another phone and dialed.

"Hello?"

"Honey?" Amanda said. "It's your mother . . ."


	10. Be Afraid

Michael and Alex were on speaker. Birkhoff and Sonya had found little to go on about either The Unbroken Academy or SWI that wasn't rumor, conjecture, or – oddly – fanfiction. They were a covert school for all-girl spies. They were an American Hogwarts. They were Xena reincarnated and beat down vampires and demons on a regular basis. And those were just the comparatively rational ones. Once Sonya found the "SWI is controlled by the lizard aliens" website, they officially gave up.

The one thing the rumors (except for the one where they were all lizards) had in common was that the people of The Unbroken Academy were the good guys.

They were also, in great big capital letters, not to be messed with – there were stories about them taking out everything from master vampires to serial killers to the Russian mob.

There were variant stories on everything. SWI either stood for Slayer-Watcher Incorporated, or Scarlet Witch International. Didn't seem to have any connection to Marvel comics, though.

Sonya had wondered at first if this was all part of some elaborate game – like the promoters of AI had done way back when, setting up fake websites and journals to make it seem more realistic. (The website for The Rational Hatter was still out there.) So she checked to see who owned the websites, and who was behind the owners, and so on, and found that, while the majority of the websites were set up by people in California, the Baltimore/DC area, or England, they otherwise had nothing in common – if this was all part of some game or conspiracy, it was so well hidden that she couldn't find any trace of it.

He hated not to be able to give Michael and Alex much concrete information, but the only place where that seemed to exist was on the SWI website, and there was no way he was going beyond the superficial on that website, not if the Scarlet Witch was responsible for their security.

They told Michael and Alex as much as they had, and Alex asked, "When would Nikita have met these people?"

"Probably back after she left Division," Michael said. "There were weeks in there we lost track of her."

"Really, though? Vampires?" Alex said. "I mean, I'm willing to believe that they were some kind of counterpart to Division, but that we've got a covert group of vampire-hunters based in a nursing home in Baltimore - that doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Birkhoff had heard rumors even before he and Sonya had started looking that Division agents were actually taught what to do if they ran across a demon. He'd always assumed it was a hypothetical disaster scenario, like "What would you do during the zombie apocalypse" to test recruits' inventiveness and ability to think on their feet.

Michael's next words made him wonder otherwise for a few seconds. "More sense than –" He broke off and said, "Do you hear that?" Alex could be heard swearing.

Ryan said, "Hear what?"

"Shots," Alex said. "Sounds like rifle fire. Distant. Not at us."

"Let's go," Michael said.

The car doors opened, and then came the shots that even the three of them back at "mission control" could hear.

"Michael, Alex, report!" Ryan said.

A few nerve-wracking seconds later, Alex's voice came through. "We're here," she said. "I didn't see anything." More gunfire.

Michael said, "Me neither." A second later, another shot and, "The shots are coming from the edge of the property – they've got trees for cover. We're behind a couple of bushes and the car, but at the moment we're pinned."

"Any way you can get out of there?" Ryan asked.

"Not right now. There's no solid cover close enough – huh."

"What?"

"We have to go. We've got – cover, of a sort, now, and we're making a break for the building."

Alex said, "Michael –" and then they lost the connection.

"They're still moving," Birkhoff said. "Near as I can tell they're walking openly up the middle of the driveway."

"Walking?" Ryan asked. Birkhoff confirmed it. "Slow break."

"Yeah. Sonya? Any chance of getting a satellite view?"

"Already on it," she said. "I'll let you know."

"So now what do we do?" Birkhoff asked.

FLASHBACK

Maybe fifteen minutes – having seen stories on a hurricane, a baseball brawl, and a dog that sounded like it talked - Steph staggered back and said, "I'm done," with a disgusted look on her face.

Flipping off the TV, Xander said, "What did you get?"

"A strong desire to vomit," Steph said. "He's done some evil things."

"Psychopaths are like that," Nikita said.

But Steph was shaking her head. "He's not a psychopath. He's got a conscience. He loves his parents, his wife, and his children. He's just got it buried extremely deep." She took a deep breath and said, "That's good, actually. This wouldn't work if he were a psychopath. Anyway, the big boss's name is Julian Mirsky and they do business out of "Big Julie's Crab House," a seafood restaurant near the city-county line. I got everyone else's names, too, but I'm not going to bore you with them now."

"And is he afraid?" Xander asked.

"Scared out of his mind."

"Afraid?" Nikita asked.

Xander said, "Yeah. We didn't bring him here just to get information from him, though that was a major reason. We also wanted to test out our theory on how to keep these bastards from coming after us, short of killing them."

"You didn't seem to have a problem with me killing the two hitters on the golf course," Nikita said.

"That's different," Xander said. "That was self-defense. Well, technically, other-defense. We don't kill human beings that aren't trying to kill us. So if we've got to deal with a human problem like this one, we do our best to make sure no one dies." He paused. "That doesn't mean we don't want to teach them why it's a really bad idea to piss us off."

"He's waking up," Steph said.

Vasily rolled over and fell off the bed. Looking up, he saw Xander and Nikita standing a couple of feet away. His face grew angry, then quickly became terrified, as if he'd just seen the most frightening thing he'd ever seen in his life. "Wh—wh- what did you do?" he stammered out, trying to back away.

"You're scared of us," Xander said.

"No! I -" Xander leaned forward. "Yes! Get away!" And if the man wasn't honestly terrified, he was a better actor than any Nikita had ever seen.

"Untie him," Xander said. At Nikita's questioning look, he said, "I'm sure."

Nikita leaned down and took the ropes off of Vasily's feet, then his hands. "Stand up," Xander said. Vasily scrambled to his feet. "Here," Xander said, handing him a knife. "Come at me." He turned around and mouthed, "Be ready" to Nikita, presumably in case he somehow managed to overcome being scared out of his mind.

They had nothing to worry about. Vasily took a step forward – holding the knife underhanded, so Nikita knew he actually had some knowledge of how to use one – and then stopped, dropped the knife, and stepped back. "I can't," he said.

"You can't even think about hurting us without getting afraid, can you?"

"No," Vasily spat out in a mix of anger and terror.

"Good." Xander said. "You're lucky we let you keep being able to defend yourself, but we don't like to get people killed, even ones that barely qualify, like you."

"So," Vasily said scornfully. "You are just going to let me go now?"

Nikita said, interrupting Xander, "No. Not yet. You might not be able to hurt us, but we still don't want you warning your friends." Then she picked up the knife and handed it back to Xander.

And then Vasily gave an evil grin. "Go ahead," he said. "Try to knock me out. As soon as you attack me, I can fight back. I need no knife to take you."

"He don't know you vewy well, do he?" Xander said.

"No, he does not," Nikita said, smiling.

END FLASHBACK

The room was a small office, clearly unused, and unfurnished except for a couple of chairs. Alex said, "Michael, no!" as soon as she saw Nikita. Stepping inside and shutting the door behind her, she saw Michael, behind the door, putting down a third chair. He immediately hugged her. She hugged him back. Alex stayed seated; she looked equal parts confused, hurt, and angry.

"I guess I should have known better than to think I could get away from you guys," she said.

"You think this is funny?" Alex asked.

"No," Nikita said. "I don't."

Michael pulled away from the hug as Alex said, "Why didn't you stay?"

"While I'm with you, you're targets." The sound of a gunshot from outside. "See what I mean?"

Softly, Michael said, "You don't have to sacrifice yourself. We're here."

Nikita pulled gently out of the hug and said, "You're wrong. I do. Amanda's focus is on me. She framed me. And as long as you're around, you're on her radar, because you matter to me." Another gunshot. "Anyway, this isn't time for a heart-to-heart. We're under attack."

"We noticed," Alex said. "I also saw that rifle shell you were looking at, Michael – I've seen turtles move faster. What the hell kind of tech are they working on here?"

Nikita and Michael looked at each other. "Should we tell her?" Nikita asked.

"Should you tell me what?" Alex said.

"Do you trust us? I mean, implicitly?" Michael said. "Because we don't have time for long explanations or proof."

"Of course," Alex said.

Michael said, "Magic."

Alex looked back and forth between them and said, "You're joking."

Nikita said, "No. They used to teach Division recruits about it - and vampires, and demons, and werewolves. They stopped telling them about it maybe a year after I got there. Why, I don't know. Michael?"

"I don't know all the details," he said. "I know it was Amanda's idea. She said she'd recently had a bad experience with it and didn't want to expose the recruits to the temptation. Of course, we know how trustworthy she is."

Disbelief still obvious on her face, Alex said, "Vampires? Werewolves? Really?"

"Really," Nikita said. "Do you really think we'd pick now to play some kind of joke on you?"

"No," she said. "I'm actually wondering if this is one of Amanda's head games."

"It's not," Michael said. "But still, Nikita, why did you come here?"

"I helped them out with a problem they had with the Russian mob about four years back," she said. "They said they owed me, and I came to collect."

"And before you could collect, someone out there started shooting at you," Alex said.

"Before I could finish collecting," Nikita said. "Their computer person was working on tracking down Amanda for me."

"If Birkhoff and Sonya couldn't do it," Michael said. "Why could he?"

Usually Michael knew better. "He's a she," Nikita said, and Michael winced. "Her name's Willow, and around here she's considered better than Birkhoff and Sonya put together, and that's not an insult to either of them. She was able to confirm that Amanda's real name is Helen Collins, for instance." She shook her head. "Anyway, that isn't important at the moment. Right now, we're under siege. Since they're able to show down the rifle shots, whoever's shooting – you didn't get a look, did you?" They both told her they hadn't. "Whoever's shooting, if they actually want me dead, is going to have to try to take the building by force."

"And then . . ." Alex said.

"And then the attackers get their asses kicked."

Michael said, "Well, then, we'd better get out there."

"I didn't come here because of Willow's computer expertise," she said. "That was a nice coincidence, but I came here because the young women here are the best fighters I've ever seen."

"That good?"

"Half of them could beat _Roan_. The only way I could beat any of them is because I've been doing it longer. And against Faith? The three of us together would be lucky to hit her once."

Michael and Alex looked at her carefully. Finally, Alex said, "You're not kidding."

"Not about any of it," Nikita said. "I wish you weren't here – and you know why – but since you are, you may as well help. But once this is over, I'm still going off by myself. I want the five of you to get good and lost. Drop off the radar."

"Not going to happen," Michael said.

"We already said that," Alex said. "We're your family. Family sticks by each other."

Another shot rang out. "We'll get to that afterward," she said, opening the door.

"Better had," Amanda said.

Gigi and Willow were there. Willow was on the phone. Gigi smiled faintly and said, "Faith told me to give you these back." She handed Michael and Alex their pistols.

"You trust us?" Alex asked.

"We trust Nikita," Gigi said.

"I'm a little busy right now," Willow said to the person on the other end of the phone as she got closer. "I'll be careful. Goodbye." Then, to everyone, "Sorry about that. My mother would choose the middle of a siege to call and check up on me, wouldn't she?"

X

Author's Note: Yes.


	11. Surrender Nikita

Amanda hung up, annoyed and, in a way, proud. Willow had let very little slip – only that she was busy. There had been a lot of movement in the background, and she heard, faintly but distinctly, Nikita's voice. That had not been the main purpose of her call, but she was willing to take happy accidents where she could get them.

She had managed to keep Willow a secret from most of Division. Even Percy had never known. It wouldn't have availed him anything if he had, because Willow and her friends, whom she now knew to be the forces behind SWI, were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.

In a certain way, this did make her proud. Willow had proven that a young woman who grew up largely on her own, with a mother and father who were absentee, could overcome obstacles and achieve great things. It had been a quite successful experiment. Many of the principles she had learned from raising Willow, she had used on her charges at Division. That is why their best recruits were the likes of Nikita, who had been neglected her whole life. Neglect made one strong, but directionless. Division had provided that direction for a number of people.

Had "Sheila Rosenberg" not been part of Division, Willow would have made an excellent recruit. Perhaps not as a field agent; but even that, perhaps. Nikita had scarcely been the combat master she later became when dragged out of prison.

Amanda, in her own way, still felt responsible for the girl, even though it was clear that she had never "needed" a mother. Love was the wrong word. But Amanda did not want her harmed.

Truthfully, at this point, Panos and his men would be fortunate to get away intact. Willow's "friends" rarely killed, but they often left their living opponents with absolutely no desire whatever to confront them, or anyone else, again.

Still, proud as she may have been in her daughter in the abstract, in the concrete it would prove troublesome.

Her phone rang. Willow was calling her back.

XXXXX

There were reports from the roof that the mercenary troop was starting in – and they were shooting kind of at random, so that the witches on the roof had a harder time throwing up the shield. Some of the shells were getting through. Faith swore for about the five hundredth time since she'd woken up that morning.

Even worse, they had a bazooka or some type of missile weapon. Faith told everyone that taking out the guys with that was the priority. They could get out of the way of the shots and all they'd do is ricochet out of the way, but a bazooka would do damage no matter where it hit.

She left the war room to join in the fighting herself and ran smack into a screaming match. Nikita and the guy were yelling at Willow, who was giving as good as she got, while the girl who'd come in with the guy – Alex, right, that was her name – was trying to calm everyone down, with Gigi helping her.

"Whoa, whoa!" She said. "Save the fighting for the guys with the guns. What's going on here?"

"What's going on," Nikita said, "Is that Willow's Amanda's daughter!"

Faith's eyes widened. Whatever she'd been expecting, it sure as hell hadn't been that. "What?" she asked.

"Well, you know how my mother called and I came out here," Willow said, "And Nikita and Michael and Alex came out, and Gigi handed them their guns and then I told my mother goodbye, and before I knew it Nikita came over and grabbed my phone out of my hand and pressed a button or two and told Michael and Alex 'look,' and they looked, and Alex just gaped, while Michael showed me the phone and said 'explain this,' and . . ."

"Okay!" Faith said firmly, wanting to get this done sometime before next Tuesday. "Gigi?" Even at her perkiest, Gigi had never been a babbler.

Gigi said, "And Willow said, 'Explain what? That's my mother," and Nikita said, 'That's Amanda!' and then they just went 'yes it is, no it isn't' for a minute or so until you came out of the War Room."

"It's Amanda," Alex said calmly. "Or if it isn't, it's her identical twin."

"Red?" Faith said.

"It can't be," Willow said in a serious voice. "My mother's been absent, not evil." Now that she wasn't going a mile a minute, she sounded like she was afraid Nikita might be right.

"Let's settle this," Faith said. "Nicky? Give me the phone."

After Nikita handed over the phone, Faith handed it to Willow. "Call your mom back, put it on speaker, and hand it to Nicky."

Willow did so without saying a word. Two rings and, "Willow? What is it?"

"Hello, Amanda," Nikita said.

"Nikita," the voice on the other end of the phone said, and as soon as she said it, it proved Nikita, Michael and Alex right, and Willow wrong. "I'd ask how you got this number, but I'm hardly going to insult your intelligence."

"I appreciate that," Nikita said, obviously meaning nothing like it. "So. You're a mother."

"I always thought she was a mother," Alex said.

"Clever, Alexandra," Amanda said.

"Mom?" Willow said faintly.

"Yes, Willow. It's me."

"Is this why there were never any pictures of you when you were little around the house?"

"It is indeed."

"Was my father real?" Willow asked.

"Merely an actor, darling," Amanda said. Boy, she was a cold bitch.

"Am I –" Willow began.

Faith cut her off. They couldn't afford to have Willow go catatonic or freak out, not ever, but certainly not now. "Enough of this shit," Faith said. "Give me the phone."

"This isn't over," Nikita said as she gave Faith the phone.

"You're right. Nicky? You're with me. Rest of you, stay out here. Make yourselves useful. Make sure no one's about to come crashing through the front door. Red? This means you, too. Collapse on your own time." And she spun in place, opened the War Room door, and walked in. "We have an issue," Faith said, breaking into a conversation between Giles and Claudia. "Person on the other end of this phone is Willow's mom. She's also the one who sent those guys out here after us."

"Mrs. Rosenberg?" Xander said.

"Hello, Alexander," Amanda said.

"You're the bad guy?"

"I prefer to think we're beyond such outmoded concepts, Alexander," Amanda said.

Say this for Giles, he came back from being caught short quicker than almost anyone Faith'd ever met. "The villains often prefer to think that way, Mrs. Rosenberg," he said. "Most of the rest of us are aware that we will never be beyond such things."

"I must apologize, Mr. Giles," she said. "I truly had no intention of getting any of you, much less my daughter, in my troubles with Nikita."

"What's Willow's other friend's name?" Xander asked suddenly.

Amanda answered quickly. "Buffy Anne Summers."

"I figured as much," Xander said bitterly.

"So, you gonna call off your dogs, or what?" Faith asked.

"Are you planning to surrender Nikita?"

Nikita spat, "No."

"I was unclear," Amanda said. "There was no comma in that statement, and it was directed at everyone in the room but you. Are the rest of you prepared to surrender Nikita?"

Robin said, "Add a 'Hell' to that no."

"Then I am not responsible for the consequences. They have instructions not to kill either my daughter or Nikita, and they aren't being paid to kill or injure anyone else."

"Seeing as they tried to punch their way through a building with rifle fire," Faith said, "I'm thinking these minions of yours ain't so good at following directions."

"An error, which has since been corrected," Amanda said.

"Mrs. Rosenberg," Xander said. "You do know our track record, right?"

"I have some knowledge, Alexander," she said. "But I suspect that even if I pulled back the mercenaries now, there would be consequences."

"At the moment," Giles said, "None of us are dead or even badly injured. Should that change, we would spare no effort or expense in finding you or bringing you to justice."

"Do you truly think the authorities are going to believe the people harboring a fugitive?" Amanda asked scornfully.

Faith said, "Yeah. Nicky told us all about that. Might take us a while to unwrap that bullshit, but she ain't going down for killing the President on our watch."

"You believed her?" she asked.

Nikita said, "You calling someone else on trustworthiness. That's rich, Helen. Amanda? Mrs. Rosenberg? Whatever you're going by at the moment. If you said two plus two was four I'd check my math just to be sure you weren't lying."

"In any event," Giles said, "If you are not going to call of the attackers, then further discussion is pointless. I would congratulate you on somehow managing to raise such an accomplished young woman as Willow, except we both know you had very little to do with the person she became. Faith, end the call."

Faith broke the connection and said, "Just wanted to let you guys know it ain't just a routine big bad we're going up against here, it's Willow's mom." Course, Willow's mother made hers look like Carol freaking Brady, and her ma was a negligent, abusive drunk.

"And how does Willow feel about this?" Robin asked.

"Willow feels fine," a voice came from the door. Faith turned around and saw that Willow had come in She sounded pissed, so Faith looked at her eyes.

They were clear. And her hair was normal color.

"Really?" she said. "I'm not the Hulk, people."

"Well, you _did_ just get some bad news," Xander said.

"Pish and tosh," she said, though she didn't seem near as happy at the words made it sound. "I've always known my mother wasn't a particularly good mother. Finding out that I was probably just an experiment and that she's actually evil only exaggerates what I already thought." She took a deep breath. "Anyway, that's not why I came in here. There's a group coming towards the front door. They think they're being subtle, but they're not. I stopped Michael and Alex from using them for target practice and came in to get you."

"Why'd you stop them?" Nikita asked.

"'cause they need to get closer if we're going to work our magic," Faith said. "Okay. Noncombatants, stay here. Red, Nicky, you're with me."

FLASHBACK

Steph left, saying she "needed to go wash her brain out with Top Job," which left Xander and Nikita bored and watching Vasily lie unconscious on the floor.

"There's nothing else we need to do?" Nikita asked.

"Not for a few hours," Xander said. "We'll be ready to strike my then. I'm sure you want to be in on that."

"I do," she said.

"Good. We'll just stash ol' Vasily here until then. After that, I dunno. Maybe we'll stuff him in the trunk or something. Say, you hungry?"

Well, she wasn't starving, but she could use something, and said as much/

Xander tossed her a Twinkie. "Breakfast of champions," he said, flipping the TV back on.

END FLASHBACK

Nikita followed Faith out to the lobby. Gigi, Michael and Alex had all taken cover, Michael and Alex behind a couple of couches, Gigi –

Gigi was crouched on a thin ledge above the entrance. Another young woman Nikita didn't recognize was also up there.

Faith muttered to Nikita, "walk down the hall with me," and they turned until they were out of sight of the front door. "Get down and go join your friends," she said. "I'll be helping Gigi. And tell them to stay down. See that room right there?" She pointed to the left.

"Yeah," Nikita said.

"Claudia and a couple of others are in there with crossbows .That's our arrow slit room. Anyone comes in we don't know, someone sits in there, just in case. We're attacked? We got room for four. Unless your pals want a bolt in the back -"

"They'll stay down," Nikita said.

"Good. And, one more thing. Try not to kill 'em. I ain't asking you to be stupid about it, but try not to leave 'em dead."

Nikita nodded. "Got it." She usually worked better as a free agent, but this was a siege, and they were on Faith's home turf. She dropped to the floor and crawled forward.

In the meantime, Faith edged along the far wall of the highway before jumping up onto a series of miniature ledges that kept her out of view of the front doorway, and ended up perched above the door.

Nikita joined Michael and Alex and told them about the arrow slits. Alex looked back and said, "I like that."

"So do I," Michael said. "And did you notice these couches?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not up on the latest furniture designs," Nikita said.

"I wasn't talking about the fabric. Feel them." Nikita did. They seemed unusually sturdy. "What do you want to be," he continued," that if we tried to fire our pistols through this it wouldn't work?"

"They're set up for a siege," Alex said.

Right then, a pair of shots shattered the glass in the front doorway.

"Here they come . . ." Nikita muttered.


	12. No One gets Hurt

About five seconds after the glass shattered, the first of the mercenaries came in and looked around. She and Michael and Alex were well concealed behind the couch, and he didn't even think to look up. He yelled that the coast was clear in Greek and took a couple of steps further in.

Another step and he'd see them. Right then three other mercenaries came in. Faith gave a signal to the other three women up on the ledges, and as one they dropped onto the invaders.

It worked for three of the four. The fourth took another half step and the girl jumping on him only caught him a glancing blow as she hit the floor. She rolled to her feet as the merc leveled his weapon, but even as fast as she was he was going to get at least one shot off.

Nikita flattened herself against the floor and shot the mercenary from that angle; the man was hit by her bullet and a crossbow bolt from the arrow slit room simultaneously, once in the left foot, once in the left shoulder. That gave the girl enough time to get up and deck him with one punch. The other three were already down; they'd never seen Faith and the others coming. Two were unconscious, while the one Faith had was still awake.

"Okay, drag 'em to the holding area and strip 'em down to their underwear," Faith said. "Bandage up the one guy and stick the conscious one in interrogation. He struggles, knock him out." Gigi got two of them and the other two girls each picked an attacker and began carting them down the hall. Faith scrambled back up to the ledge, stood up, and peered out the window. "We got a second wave," she said. Shots rang out and sent Nikita diving for cover. Michael and Alex fired off a couple of shots into the distance; Nikita could see the mercenaries a couple of hundred feet from the entrance, too far for accuracy with the kind of handguns they were carrying, but close enough that they couldn't just march up to the door, either.

Whipping out a cell phone, Faith said to someone, "Cut loose. We got one."

A flurry of crossbow bolts came from the roof, joined by a couple whistling over their heads. The three of them got off a few more shots.

The four mercenaries outside either went down or dove for cover; not a single one was uninjured. Faith jumped down and scurried around the nearest corner. A couple more rifle shots came towards them, but not nearly as many. "Okay, you guys. Come on," she said, diving across the lobby towards a door on the far side, opening it from the floor, then crawling through.

A couple of seconds later, her head reappeared in the open doorway, saying, "Yeah, I meant you. Come on."

They crawled across the floor into the room. Faith was standing in the corner with the carpet peeled back and a trap door open. "The girls can't always leave and come back through the front door," she said. "we got a half dozen of these things."

"Where are we going?" Alex asked.

"We're going to take care of the guys we just knocked down and then scout around, see if we can find a command post. You guys good at stealthy?"

"Are we alive?" Michael asked wryly.

"Good point," Faith said. "Come on, then." Faith jumped into the hole. The three of them then climbed down maybe twenty feet into a dark passage, which Faith lit up with a flashlight. It was as crude as an underground passage could get; the walls, floor and ceiling were made of packed earth, with wooden crossbeams holding up the walls and ceiling.

It was maybe a hundred feet long and came out behind a clump of trees about halfway down the driveway. They exited quietly and looked around. Seeing the four mercenaries hunched behind a clump of shrubbery, Nikita tapped Faith and pointed at them, then grabbed Michael and Alex and gestured for them to circle around.

They quietly counted to three and began creeping up on the mercenaries, Nikita with her pistol drawn, Faith with a pair of knives. Michael and Alex were out of sight.

One of the mercenaries spotted them when they were about twenty feet away. Professionals should have been more alert, but these guys had the excuse of all having crossbow bolts sticking out of various parts of their bodies. He aimed his rifle, but never got off a shot, yelping in pain as one of Faith's knives buried itself in his left hand. Two of the other three turned to face her; the third was unconscious.

Nikita had her pistol leveled at them. "You know the drill," she said.

"And if you're thinking about going for your guns," Faith said, "Don't just be looking at Nicky's Glock. I still got plenty of knives here."

"And there are two more of us standing behind you," Michael said in fluent Greek. Even if they weren't all Greek, the fact that the leader of the group that came in spoke it to his comrades showed that they all understood it at least to some extent. "Throw down all of your weapons."

A few seconds later, there was a pile of weaponry at their feet; rifles, pistols, and a couple of knives. Faith took the knives, stepped on the pistols, and told Michael, Alex, and Nikita to each take one of the rifles, while she picked up a fourth one. "What should we do them?" Faith asked.

"I say kill them," Alex said.

"They did surrender," Michael said.

"So? They were going to kill us," Alex said. "I say kill them painfully and make the other ones watch so they know what's coming."

Alex sounded so sincere that Nikita had to look at her face to make sure she was bluffing. She saw a very real anger, but not a murderous rage.

"Guys," Faith said, "Our turf, our rules. We don't kill 'em." After a second, she added, "It's hard to get information from them when they're dead. Okay. Which of you can walk?" None of the mercenaries answered. "Well, we're sure as shit not carrying you, and we ain't leaving you in any shape to do more damage behind us. So if you want your buddy there to get medical attention, two of you'll have to carry him."

"It is not that," one of them said in accented English. "There is a third unit in this area. If we simply march up to the front door, they will shoot us to get to you."

"Hmmm." It wouldn't bother Nikita particularly if these people got themselves killed, but they didn't want to risk their own lives in getting them inside.

"I have it," Nikita said after a second. She called everyone over – Alex still looking at the mercenaries to make sure none of them decided to get creative – and said, "Faith, I'm assuming we're not taking them in underground because we don't want them to see that there's another way in, right?"

"Yeah. We got alarms set up, but it'd be a bitch having another front to deal with."

"Okay. You go in the secret entrance. We'll watch these guys until you give us a signal. Then we'll tell these guys to march in, by themselves – and we'll shoot them if they try to make a break for it. Then we'll carry the unconscious one in through the passage."

"And we won't be lying," Michael said. "We will shoot them. We won't shoot to kill, but we don't have to let them know that."

Nodding her head, Faith said, "Okay. Sounds good."

And that part of it worked fine. The mercenaries weren't willing to shoot their own people. Michael and Alex started to carry the unconscious attacker through the secret passage. Nikita was about to join them when she heard a rumple of leaves behind her.

Knowing that Amanda wanted her alive, she took off immediately, zigging and zagging, not risking a look back until she was in the clear by the side of the main building.

There were two of them following her. They had their handguns drawn, but they weren't shooting, instead trying to catch up with her.

Their mistake. She slowed down slightly, allowed them to make up some ground, then abruptly stopped, turned, and fired in their general direction.

Not stupid, they threw themselves to the ground the second they saw her pistol, and her shot flew over their heads. Which was fine; the gunshot had had two purposes. One was the effect it had: making her pursuers hit the dirt. The second was to attract the attention of the folks on the roof.

She wasn't going to just stand around waiting for help, though. Before the two men could get up, she kicked one of them in the head. A half second later, the other one tackled her, and her pistol went flying.

The guy had training, and weight; instead of punching her, he tried choking her. But he had just a little too much momentum to pull it off, and Nikita rolled with the movement and flipped over. The man was still choking her, but from underneath.

She didn't have time to fool around; the man she'd kicked wasn't unconscious. So she poked him as hard as she could in both eyes. He yowled and let go, and Nikita rolled off of him and scrambled for her pistol, reaching it right as the second man was on top of her. Rolling over, she leveled it at him and said, "Stop."

In Greek, the man she'd poked in the eyes said, "Two against one. I think we can capture her."

Nikita wasn't as competent speaking Greek as Michael was, but she responded in the same language: "I think I shoot you if you try."

"And if she doesn't," came a voice from the roof, "We will. Hi, Nikita!" She looked up and saw Gigi and a couple of other Slayers pointing crossbows at her two attackers."

Taking the men raising their hands as a sign that they weren't going to try anything stupid, Nikita stood up, keeping her gun pointed at them, just in case they were.

They weren't.

"How're we going to get them inside?" Nikita asked.

"We already have that covered," Gigi said. "Hey boys! Drop all your weapons!" The mercenaries did so. "Good. Nikita, put them in the bag."

"What bag -?" she began, only to have the question answered when a sack was lowered to the ground from the roof. The weapons went up first, followed by both mercenaries.

"Your turn," Gigi said.

Nikita grabbed the rope and seconds later was on the roof. The two mercenaries had already been stripped down to their underwear and socks, and their hands were tied. "How are things going?" she asked.

"Another group made it to the back entrance," Gigi said. "They're shooting anything that moves , but we have them pinned down in one of the classrooms. No one else has gotten close."

""We've captured ten, four more are pinned inside; how the hell many people did Amanda hire?"

"We've seen at least ten more," one of the other Slayers said.

"She didn't send a hit squad," Nikita said. "She sent a private army. Anyone hurt?"

"Yeah," Gigi said somberly. "Two Slayers, one witch. Nothing life-threatening, but still." She shook her head. "No one gets hurt. No one. I want these people's heads on a plate." She was deadly serious.

Nikita knew better than to try to jolly her out of her mood swing, but said, "Well, we've got them captured, pinned, or on the run, so that's something."

"It is," she said. "It's not enough, but it's something." She took a deep breath and said, "Now come on. We have to get you off the roof."

The two prisoners were dropped through a drop door, to Nikita's surprise, until she saw the women waiting to catch them underneath. She followed Gigi down a ladder and a flight of stairs. There was the sound of gunfire from down the hall to her right. Nikita instinctively turned in that direction, but a voice from behind her said, "No."

She turned and saw Claudia. "No?"

"No. We got them. Everyone else is either running or incapacitated. They don't have high explosives in there, or any missile weapons, so they can't blow out a wall; if try climbing out the windows or coming through the door they'll be shot before they go ten feet; and we have ways of dealing with them if they sit tight."

"And if they try the ceiling or floor?" Nikita asked. It was unlikely; these guys didn't seem that creative. But you never knew when one of them might be brighter than he looked.

"Nothing under the floor there but the foundation. We do have a crawlspace above us, though. Hold on. Holly? Kaye? Go up into the ceiling space. You see anything larger than a squirrel, shoot it."

Two women, presumably Holly and Kaye, immediately left and headed down the hall. "Thanks," Claudia said.

"No problem."

Faith came down the hall. "Nicky? Come on. We got two people that're worried about you, and a dozen or so who're just dying to answer your questions."

"I doubt that," Nikita said.

"Well, they'll answer them anyway," Faith said. "Siege is over. They'll tell us where to find Amanda."

"And then," Nikita said, "We kill her."


	13. No Kill Like Overkill

Ryan and Birkhoff had taken off five minutes after they lost contact with Michael and Alex. Birkhoff wasn't action guy, but here he was anyway. Sure, he'd learned more about hand-to-hand in around two years hanging out with Nikita than in seven years at Division, which made him competent, but he still wasn't confident in his ability to take down heavily armed mercenaries. Still, under the circumstances, it wasn't like they had a lot of choice. He loved Sonya, and she was second only to him and maybe the Scarlet Witch – which would technically make her third – in her ability to make a computer do everything short of growing wings, but as a fighter, she was an excellent computer geek.

Which is something she'd have been the first to admit.

They'd been on the road maybe half an hour – speeding the whole way – when they got a call from Sonya. "Michael and Alex just checked in," she said. "They're okay. They've found Nikita. And they're under siege."

"Tell them we're fifteen minutes out," Ryan said.

"I will. Here's the situation. They're in the Unbroken Academy, which is surrounded by a small army of what seems like mostly Greek mercenaries, who are armed with, at least, rifles, high-end pistols, and knives. They've captured some of them and it seems like they're winning. They're waiting for Nikita to get back inside so they can begin interrogating their prisoners. And they've discovered a new alias for Amanda. For two decades she has also been known as Sheila Rosenberg, a well-known child psychologist, who lectures with her 'husband' Ira."

"I heard those quotes," Birkhoff said.

"Yes. As best I can tell, Ira Rosenberg does not actually exist. The records are suitable for a brief examination, but not in-depth research. And even this isn't the biggest news."

"You're drawing this out for dramatic effect, aren't you/"

"Absolutely," Sonya said. "It's what I live for. The biggest news," she said as they passed the exit for I-83 South, "is that Amanda has a daughter."

Birkhoff envied Ryan his iron control; if he'd been driving the car, news like that would have made him run off the road. "What?" they said.

"It's true. Her name's Willow. And she's one of the people involved in SWI. She's at the Academy right now, in fact; Michael and Alex have met her. They said she seemed as surprised as you did. Although –"

"Although what?" Ryan asked.

"Though the people at the Academy were apparently worried about her getting mad. Apparently, to get geeky, we wouldn't like her when she becomes angry. She made the Hulk reference herself."

"Something she and her mother have in common," Birkhoff said. "They trust this Willow?"

"They appear to. Alex said, and I quote, 'She's lying, she'd make a better spy than all of us put together.' They're uncertain how she's going to react to our desire to make Amanda painfully dead, but she certainly doesn't seem to be helping her mother."

"Any instructions for us?" Ryan said.

"Don't come," she said. "Failing that – as they certainly expected – keep an eye out for Greek men in multicolored SUVs. The way things were going when they called the tide was definitely in their favor."

"Okay," Ryan said. "We should be there in ten. If they call back, tell them."

"Will do," Sonya said.

In fact, they were there in eight.

And the mercenaries were in full retreat. A couple of SUVS came barreling past them at top speed right as they reached the front of the Academy.

"Want to go see where they were coming from?" Ryan asked.

"Go towards whatever's making heavily armed mercenaries flee in terror?" Birkhoff said. "Sure, why not?"

"Your sarcasm isn't helping," Ryan said.

"Who says I'm being sarcastic?"

They lucked out, if by "lucked out" you mean they ran across a trio of injured mercs climbing into a third SUV. Ryan parked the car so it was blocking the access road, got out, and drew his handgun. "Stop right there!" he said.

One of them reached for a handgun anyway, only to be brought short when a shot from Birkhoff shattered the glass behind him. "Not bad," Ryan said.

"Not good," Birkhoff said. "I was aiming for the tire." Still, it did the trick, as the man immediately froze. "So," he said quietly, 'Now that we've caught them, what do we do?"

"Sonya said they were capturing these guys," Ryan said. "I say we turn them in."

"How?"

"You guys have restraints?" Ryan asked them loudly. There was no response. "Okay, either you have restraints, or we shoot you here."

"In the back," one of them said sullenly after a few seconds.

"Good. Get them." The last part was said to Birkhoff, who cautiously walked to the back of the vehicle, opened it up, and rummaged around until he found two sets of shackles.

"Here's what they've got," Birkhoff said.

"Hmmm. How are we going to work this?"

"I got this one," Birkhoff said.

XXXXX

Faith and Nikita were walking up to the main entrance when one of the Slayers-in-training came up to her, laughing. "You have to see this," she said, and jogged back up to the now-shattered front doors.

Coming up the main driveway was a car. There was a mercenary chained to each side mirror, jogging along, and a third had both of his hands out of the otherwise closed passenger side window.

"Oh, good grief," Nikita said.

"You know these people, Nicky?"

"Yeah. The guy driving's Ryan Fletcher. Most recent and final head of Division. Guy on the other side's Birkhoff. He's our computer guy."

"Willow's going to want to meet him,"Faith said.

"Hey, Nicky," Birkhoff said, leaning out the window. "We brought you a present."

"We got here," Ryan Fletcher said, "In time to see a couple of SUVs full of these clowns barrel out of here and caught these three right before they took off. I think there are a couple more empty ones back there in case you're interested."

Gunshots behind them. Ryan drew his gun. Faith said, "Whoa there, Tommy. We got this."

"You sure?" he said.

"We're sure."

"Okay," he said. "And my name's not Tommy."

"It's my name for you," Faith said. "Come on, you never noticed how much you look like Tom Cruise?"

Nikita smiled, Birkhoff laughed, and Ryan just looked confused. "Really?" he asked.

Birkhoff said, "Dude, over the last few months some of us were hoping we'd have to infiltrate somewhere in Hollywood, 'cause if we did we were golden."

"Okay . . . " he said. "Anyway. Where do you want these three?"

A few minutes later, the three mercenaries were being hustled into interrogation and Faith and their guests, except for Birkhoff, were in interrogation.

Birkhoff was working with Willow. Dude had been thrilled to meet her, and absolutely determined to prove that he was a better hacker than she was.

Willow'd said, "You want to go there?"

"Oh yeah."

"Let's go," she had said, and off they went, down a side hall to their computer lab. (Willow could get in from anywhere – once she'd hacked in from Antarctica when she and Kennedy were on a side mission to take care of a couple of vamps that had made their way down to McMurdo – but she didn't carry around a spare, and once Nikita vouched for Birkhoff Willow'd had no problem giving him access.

They'd caught over a dozen of the mercenaries. Three of them were hurt bad enough that they were still getting patched up, but the rest of them were packed into a ten by ten room and stripped down to their underwear, and only one of them was packing any serious heat.

"Okay," Faith said. "You guys got a leader?"

"Of course we do –" one of them said, before being cuffed by another one.

"Okay. Enough of that shit. First one talks, we let go. Everyone else, well –"

They looked at each other. Finally one of them said, "I am Spartacus."

"You're funny," Faith said.

"I'm laughing," Michael said, not laughing.

"Okay. Time to divvy these boys up. Jakey, open the door. You guys in there, stay back unless you want the crap kicked out of you again."

Nikita, Michael, Alex and Ryan all drew their guns, took a step back and pointed them at the opening door. "Just in case they don't think we're serious," Nikita said.

Quietly, Faith said to Nikita, "No kill like overkill, huh?" while gesturing for one of the men to come out of the room.

Nikita smiled. "Well, they know we're serious."

"That they do," Faith said. "Jakey, take Tommy and our boy there down the hall to room 102. Tommy, that okay?"

"Fine by me," he said. Jakey led the prisoner down the hall, followed by Tommy, who kept his weapon drawn.

They did the same thing with two more prisoners, until Faith finally said, "Okay, me and Nicky'll take this one."

They walked back towards the war room. The mercenary was clearly looking around the room, probably trying to figure his chances for booking it the hell out of here. Faith almost chuckled at the idea. Damn near anyone in the building (okay, except Andrew), including the "noncombatants," could take him down if he tried.

He tried. When they got back to the lobby, he waited until they were as close to the front door as they were going to get, and made a break for it.

He didn't get five feet. Not bothering with her gun, Nikita simply stuck out her right foot and tripped him. He faceplanted. Nikita walked over between him and the doors and said, "Nice try. Get up."

"I think you broke my nose!" he sputtered out. His nose was bleeding, maybe broke, but if he was able to bitch about it he wasn't about to get any slack from her. These bastards had been up for killing everyone in the Academy except for Nikita and maybe Willow.

"Next time it won't be your nose. And last I checked you don't walk on your nose. Get up." When he moved slow, Nikita said, "If I have to kick you to get you to stand up, I will. And you won't like where I kick you. What's your name?"

"George," he said, standing up. "You going to get me some help?"

Faith answered this time. "Since it doesn't look like you're about to bleed to death, you can hold it till we're done. Here's a tissue, though," she said, handing him one. "Try not to bleed on the furniture."

They walked into the War Room. "Okay," Xander said, standing up. "Time for some fun. Faith! Fetch my rusty chainsaw!"

He closed the door using the most over-the-top evil laugh faith had ever heard.

XXXXX

Amanda, AKA Sheila Rosenberg, AKA Helen Collins, was not the panicky sort. Even at this juncture, she was not flinging things into various pieces of carry-on luggage, preparatory to dashing onto the nearest airplane to wherever, with the eventual purpose of getting herself good and lost somewhere near the shores of Lake Baikal.

One, she'd lost almost everything she might at one point have considered worth saving, three separate time. Her childhood things in the fire that had killed the rest of the Collins family, her accumulations as Amanda when she was driven from Division by Nikita and Percy's machinations, and what she had as Sheila Rosenberg was buried at the bottom of the recently-created Sunnydale Bay.

And two, what little she had was already packed. One thing she had learned over the years was the value of a quick getaway. Material possessions could be reacquired. One's life could not – at least, not by any means available to her.

While Amanda was not scurrying around like the proverbial decapitated chicken, she was mentally preparing to depart at a moment's notice. She had received scattered reports from the assault – which had gone about as well as she'd expected, given who their targets actually were.

Not moments ago she had gotten a half-coherent call from Peter, Panos' second-in-command, saying that most of the attacking force had been captured, that she should have told them what they were getting into, and asking what they should do next.

"Did you capture Nikita?"

"Of course not!" he sputtered.

"Then, if you wish to get paid the remainder of your fee –" she had paid them one third up front – "You will retrieve her." She disconnected the call and declined to answer her phone for the next five minutes.

Being exposed before her daughter was a problem she had come nowhere close to anticipating. There had never been a clue that Nikita had contacted her daughter's allies; never a hint that the worlds had collided.

Now that Willow knew who she was, knew that her childhood had been a lie, knew that "Ira Rosenberg" was not and never had been her father, things had changed for her, and for Willow, irreparably. Not that their relationship had been close before this – but that was by Amanda's choice. Willow had been one of her finest experiments.

But the difficulty with humans as experiments is that, no matter how much you learned about them, learned how to control and predict them – and Amanda was one of the best at that – some of them had a great capacity for surprise. She had been able to predict Nikita to some extent, but obviously not to the extent she needed. Her daughter was the same way.

She doubted even now her daughter wanted her dead, any more than Amanda would delight in Willow's demise. There was enough of a familial bond for that, even under these circumstances.

What she might do hearing someone else planned her death, could possibly be a different story.

The phone rang. It was one of the people on the Shop's board. They were calling an emergency meeting and wanted her there immediately.

Understandable.

She took her necessities, and left.

XXXXX

I've always thought Noah Bean (the actor who plays Ryan Fletcher on Nikita) would be the perfect choice for anyone needing someone to play Tom Cruise.


	14. They Call Me Buttercup

There was no rusty chainsaw. Which was too bad, Nikita thought; it could have been a useful prop.

Faith and Xander playing with knives, though, while Nikita fingered her handgun and they alternative pressing George with questions, was a decent enough replacement, though. They weren't playing "good cop, bad cop," they were playing "good cop, worse cop, homicidally insane cop."

The mercenary had courage, Nikita had to give him that. A lot of people she knew, even some soldiers, would have gotten nervous watching what the three of them were doing, and started talking immediately.

George held out, giving out nothing but the soldier-of-fortune equivalent of name, rank, and serial number, even after she'd slapped him once or twice.

She knew that torture, a lot of the time, only got the person being tortured to tell you what they thought you wanted to hear; it certainly wasn't reliable in any sense of the word. That she'd used it, even on someone like Ari, shamed her. Not because Ari was so good he hadn't earned a beating or two, but that she A, was supposed to be better than that, and B, damn well knew better.

A preliminary slap, however, wasn't necessarily out of order. It was like the old joke about the man who bought a stubborn mule: First you have to get their attention.

So she and Xander had each hit the man once. (Faith had quietly murmured in the corner of the room that she was better off not doing that kind of thing, for a variety of reasons, not least of which that her full-strength slaps had the potential of breaking the man's neck.

Those had established their willingness to hurt him to within an inch of his life. Then, a promise of letting him go if he talked and George finally broke down and told them that Panos, their leader, had been the second man taken.

That meant he'd ended up being interrogated by Michael. "Okay," Xander said. "We'll see whether this pans out. If it does, you're good. As long as you never bother us again. In fact, finding another line of work might be in your best interest. Something that doesn't involve killing people for money. Capisce?"

"Huh?" George said.

Rolling her eyes, Nikita said, "Do you understand?"

"Yes," George said. "I understand."

"Good. Now, come on."

"If you put me back in with them after I've talked they'll kill me," George said.

"How will they know you've talked?" Faith said. "Ain't like we're going to tell them."

They marched him back to the holding area. Xander quietly told the two young women guarding them to keep an ear out on what they were saying, just in case. When they got back outside, they split up. "I'm heading down to the administrative wing," he said. "See what kind of executive decisions have been made."

He headed down a hallway to the right Nikita was barely aware of – "Like the weapons closet," Faith told her. "Don't worry about it" – and they kept walking.

"Tell me something," Nikita said.

"What do you want to know?" Faith asked.

"What's the command structure like around here? I mean, you seem to be in charge, but then Xander heads down the hallway for an 'executive decision' –"

"Our command structure is loose as it can get and still have us have one. Giles is in charge of the whole organization – including our satellite schools, plus any branch offices we have. Robin's the head of this school. Me, I'm in charge of the Slayers when it comes to Slaying duties – and when we're under attack. Ain't like G―" by which Nikita assumed she meant Giles – "Or Robin can't handle that; ain't like I can't handle the administrative bullshit, but I hate it. So we all fill in where we can."

"And Xander?"

"Supersub," Faith said. "He'll teach, he'll administrate, he'll counsel, he'll do whatever it takes, wherever he has to."

"Willow's your tech person, then."

"And the Head witch," Faith said, "But she ain't actually based out of here. She and her girl Kenny had a blowup and she came down here from New York for a couple of weeks to cool off. Stephie's the main witch of this branch –"

"I met her, I think."

Faith said, "Yeah, she was the one who helped you and Xan with the Russian mob way back when, isn't she? Anyway, she's on vacation right now. Everyone else does what they can. You get a shitload of leeway here, long as you keep someone else in the loop if you got the chance. Everyone can figure out what they're good at and work on it, long as they're ready to drop everything if they got to. Claudia, for instance – she's a hell of a tactician. Half the time girls in the field go to her with questions about how to handle specific situations instead of me. Which is cool by me."

"Okay," Nikita said. "It just seemed a lot looser than I'm used to."

"Probably is, if you're talking about Division," Faith said. "Also, we don't kill people for fucking up."

"Officially, neither did Division," Nikita said. "Officially, people were 'cut loose'."

"Like from the end of a rope dangling from a chopper five hundred feet up?" Faith asked.

"Something like that," Nikita said.

"Here we are." Faith knocked on the door; a voice from within said, "Advance and be recognized."

"And that would be Andrew," Faith said. Our 'morale officer'." They walked into the room and found Michael, a young woman Nikita didn't really recognize, and the young man from the lunchroom.

"And lo, our noble efforts have succeeded!" Andrew said.

"Really?" Faith asked.

"Yes! This gentleman has informed us that he, in fact, is the leader of the band of ne'er-do-wells that assaulted our fortress, and his name is Panos –"

"Andy, this ain't the time."

Andrew paused. "Right. Sorry about that."

"Well done," Nikita said, looking at Michael.

"I didn't do much," Michael said, "I called him a name and told him he'd never be able to have children anymore if he didn't talk, Zena over there threatened to do worse, and then Andrew took over."

"Make him stop talking," Panos said. "I will tell you anything. I will give you all of the money in my bank account. Just make him stop talking." The desperation in his voice would have been funny if the situation itself wasn't so serious.

"What did you do to him?" Nikita asked.

"I just asked his opinion on whether Sam Beckett was secretly a Time Lord," he said. "Can you believe he's never even heard of Doctor Who? Well, of course I had to explain everything to him in detail . . ."

"I think that's against the Geneva Convention," Nikita said, and when Andrew looked mildly hurt, she said, "Good job."

He smiled. "Thanks."

"Okay. Z, take Andy here, check on the situation down the hall, and help if you can," Faith said.

"Remember," Andrew said, pausing right in front of the door. "I can always come back." His evil grin was cheesy enough to belong on a pro wrestler, but it worked.

Michael and Nikita sat down together. Faith paced. Xander leaned against the door. "Okay," Michael said. "Tell us about Amanda. Everything you know. Where is she?"

"I've only met her once. That was in Pennsylvania. It was just outside York. The restaurant was called Isaac's." Panos, who for all his fluency in English had apparently never heard of commas, went on like this for about ten minutes, giving them pretty much everything he knew about Amanda. Unfortunately, he didn't know where she was holing up. "It is not in York. That would be too obvious. Amanda is too smart for that."

"Okay," Xander said. "We get why you went after Nikita."

"That isn't saying we like it," Michael said, grimly.

"Right," Xander said. "Being paid to kidnap and kill people doesn't put you on the side of the good guys. That alone makes you and your men contemptible pieces of shit, and we seriously doubt anyone would miss you if we just killed all you, weighted your bodies, and dumped you in the middle of Challenger Deep."

Suddenly, Panos stood up, only to be brought short when a knife from Faith whizzed by his ear and Michael caught him from behind and wrestled him back into his chair. "Easy there, buttercup," Xander said. "We didn't say we were going to kill you, only that you're not exactly in the running for most beloved people on the planet. Sadly, our problems with you going after our pal Nikita there are the least of our concerns.

Nikita said firmly, "And it's not like those are small problems."

Xander said, "Not at all. Thing is, you were also willing to go through us to do it. And that, we really don't like. It's turned this from Nikita having a few friends backing her up when she goes after your boss, to having her own army."

"An army did me no good," Panos said.

"Our army kicked your army's ass," Xander replied. "And we didn't even have guns."

"That is true," Panos said. "Who fights with bows these days?"

"No one expects medieval weaponry!" Xander said gleefully. Everyone blinked. "Oh, come on. Monty Python?"

"No, I got it," Nikita said. "I just didn't think it was funny." Xander could go from deadly serious to juvenile joking in five seconds flat. Nikita imagined that made a lot of people underestimate him.

"Everyone's a critic," Xander said, mock grumbling.

"Anyway," Faith said. "Here's the deal, 'buttercup.' You want to live? Do exactly what we say. In a few minutes we're going to give you back your phone." Nikita and Faith had come up with this plan earlier. "Then you're going to call Amanda and tell her you weren't captured."

"A man named Peter is my second-in-command. He saw me get captured," Panos said.

"Then he saw wrong," Nikita said. "If she gets suspicious and hangs up too soon, you're dead. Oh, and just to make sure you don't try to slip one by us – English the whole time."

"And even if you try something in Greek," Michael said, in Greek, "Remember, at least two of us understand it."

"That is to the right," Nikita said, and was rewarded with puzzled looks from both Panos and Michael. Mentally, she reviewed what she'd said – ah. "That is . . . correct," she said.

"Screwed up the language?" Faith asked. "Yeah, happened to me once. Went with Pinky and a Watcher to Quebec – there was a wannabe master vampire setting up shop there. After we got done – dude made Harmony seem like a genius – we stopped off at a local restaurant and Pinky convinced me to try the snails. I tried ordering – I picked up some French in prison – and the waiter looked at me like I was crazy. I tried again, and Pinky finally ordered for me. I asked her what the fuck had happened, and she told me that I'd ordered a flight of stairs instead. She's been giving me shit about it ever since." Since she was grinning at the memory, though, Nikita doubted she was that upset.

"Anyway," Nikita said. "make up whatever you have to. But keep her talking."

"You're going to try to trace her," Panos said. "I doubt you will succeed. My best man tried. I do not hire incompetents. Her signal was being bounced all over the world. It ended up on the Galapagos. I doubt she is down there studying the finches."

"I'm going to have to agree with you," Michael said. "Amanda never was much of an animal lover. If she can't experiment on it, wear it, or eat it, she doesn't care."

Xander said, "Anyway, no offense to 'your best man, but – you know what? Your best man can take all the offense he wants. He was part of the crew trying to kill us all, I'm betting. Anyway, compared to our computer person, he sucks."

"Especially when it's your computer person, plus our computer person." Nikita said.

"Point," Xander said. "So, Panos. You ready to go give this a try?"

Panos said, "I am ready. I assume my men will also be released? I will not save myself if they all die." Nikita gave him a small amount of credit for loyalty. She'd run into far too many people in her day who were willing to throw whoever they had to in the line of fire to survive.

"Everyone'll live, buttercup," Faith said.

"Then we have a deal."

As they were leaving the room, Panos said. "Wait a moment. Vampires?"


	15. Prelude to a Hissy Fit

Birkhoff was happy to get away from the action – he was fine helping when he had to, but he was happier being mission control (or the spanner in the works, in some cases).

Working next to Amanda's daughter, though – even if by all accounts the woman had had no clue that that's who she was – made him wonder, at least for a few seconds, whether he might not be better off getting shot at by heavily armed mercenaries.

But if she were anything like her mother, beyond the red hair, you couldn't have proved it by him. With Amanda, she 'd say one thing, mean another, you'd interpret it a third way, the dude next to you would interpret it a fourth way, and then in the end it would be a fifth thing if the shit hit the fan. She didn't say a word that she hadn't internally vetted two dozen times and knew exactly what it meant and how it would come across.

Willow Rosenberg, on the other hand, apparently never met a word she didn't like. She knew her computers, but would not stop talking, even while she was attempting to break into her mother's old files. This didn't particularly bother Birkhoff, who was used to hacking in the middle of the Division op center where three dozen different conversations were typically going on at once, but it was a definite change from working alongside Sonya, who was hardly reticent but tended not to be chatty when she was deep into her work.

"And by my mother," she said, "I mean Sheila Rosenberg. Not Amanda/Helen Collins."

"You never had a clue she was leading a double life?"

She smiled ruefully and said, "Not a one. Oh, she and my 'dad' – and boy howdy I'd like to know who the sperm donor was, if Ira was just an actor – I mean, am I even Jewish? What religion is 'Amanda' anyway? – because Judaism passes through the mother, at least according to some people, and if Mom's not Jewish then what am I? I mean, I'm pagan now anyway, but I'm still a very Jewish-respectful pagan, and –"

Sensing that he wasn't about to get a chance to talk unless he either interrupted or waited for Willow to exhaust the available oxygen and collapse into unconsciousness, Birkhoff said, "Amanda doesn't believe in anything."

"She's an atheist?"

Birkhoff said, "No,I'm an atheist. Amanda's a nihilist. And that's to whatever extent she thinks about it at all. This quest she has to bring down Nikita isn't just because Nicky's trying to do the same to her. Amanda believes loving people and things only brings pain, and she's determined to drive this point home to Nicky by killing everyone and everything she loves _before _finally beating her."

Bleakly, Willow said, "That doesn't surprise me. Even when she said she loved me, I could sense she was being all pro forma about the whole thing. I felt more from my 'father,' and he wasn't actually biologically related to me."

Feeling a bit like a jerk, Birkhoff still felt obliged to say, "That could be just because he's a good actor."

"I've thought of that," she said. "I'm going to think otherwise until I have proof, okay? And proof, here, not something I'm likely to go looking for, and no one else had better do so either, if they don't want to get turned into toads."

Birkhoff blinked. Willow's mind worked in interesting ways, but he recognized what she said for the half-threat half-plea that it was, and changed the subject. "Found anything?"

"Well, that I'm a big dummy for not suspecting my mother was up to something before this," she muttered. "Come here, take a look." Birkhoff slid his seat over to where he could look over Willow's shoulder. "From the time I was 10 onwards, she'd be away from home for up to forty weeks a year – and a lot of her trips home – hah! – were just quick stop-ins to refresh her wardrobe and tell me what a brilliant girl I was, before shuffling off again for another lecture. But see here? I guess she never suspected anyone would ever dig more than a layer deep, because this lecture? I just checked on the weather. The University of Maine was closed down to all nonessential personnel that day because of a blizzard." A pause, then, "still have tapes of that lecture. She'd bring them home with her occasionally and have me watch them, I guess to give me something to aspire to." Or, possibly, to manipulate Willow and encourage her to be "her own person," the way she was trying to do to Nikita. Willow had essentially been her dry run for how she handled Division and its agents. Birkhoff would not have been the least bit surprised if that'd been the only reason Amanda had ever had a kid in the first place.

"Are any of them online?" Birkhoff asked.

"No, but I digitized a few of them for practice and they've come with me ever since. Why?"

"Can I take a look?"

Willow shrugged. "Sure." She plugged in a thumbdrive and within about thirty seconds they were both looking at Amanda – looking as drab as he'd ever seen her, with dulled hair, sensible shoes, and a pair of thick glasses – speaking, animatedly, about "recent experiments in nurture vs. nature" when it came to the raising of children. After a few minutes, he asked to see the other ones. When the third one, about the mob mentality in children vs. adults, got started, he laughed.

"I'm glad you think they're funny," willow said. "About time someone got some use out of them."

"It's not that," Birkhoff said, still grinning. Just – look at this." He called up all three videos at once. "These are all the same room."

Willow looked at them for a minute or so, then turned to Birkhoff and said, "Are not!"

"Yeah. They are. You know how I know? Because I've been in that room. It's not in Division, but it's a place we used a lot when we were running ops that were going to be set at speeches or awards dinners. We redesigned the place to look like the place where the op was going to go down. Amanda would sub in for the speech-giver sometimes and bore us to tears with her presentations."

"You had a mockup just for when your target was giving a speech?" Willow asked in disbelief. "Boy, you guys are thorough."

"You'd be amazed how often it came up," Birkhoff said. "Anyway, that explains the speeches."

"And the journal articles?" She shook her head. 'No. Wait. I've got that one myself. No one ever has to meet her for her to get her papers published – and there's enough of a paper trail out there for Sheila Rosenberg that anyone who spent a few minutes looking would be satisfied she was real. Plus, you know, there was nothing actually stopping her from meeting people, as long as she didn't run across people who knew her as Amanda."

"Plus, she put some effort into not sounding or looking like Amanda," Birkhoff said. "I mean, the resemblance is there, but 'Sheila' doesn't talk or dress anything like the woman I'm familiar with. Not good enough to pass a detailed inspection, but enough that anyone giving her a casual glance might just say, "Huh, she looks like someone I know' and head off to get their morning coffee."

Growling I frustration, Willow said, "And none of this helps us find out where she is right now. All it's doing is making me realize that my childhood sucked even more than I thought it did."

"We can help," a voice came from behind them. Birkhoff and Willow turned around and saw Nikita and Michael coming into the room, trailed by a couple of the people from here, plus one of the attackers. It was the guy with the eyepatch who'd spoken. "And how can we help? I'm glad you asked. Panos here, in order to save his own just slightly above worthless ass, and the equally worthless asses of his cohorts, he's going to help us track down Amanda."

"Or we're going to hurt him," Michael said flatly.

"You do not have to threaten me," Panos said. "I will do as you ask."

"Here's where you come in, Will," eyepatch said. "You, too, Nikita's friend –" he snapped his fingers.

Nikita said, "Birkhoff."

"Like the guy from MASH?" eyepatch said.

"That was Burghoff, Xander," Willow said in an exasperated but amused tone. Right then. Eyepatch's real name was Xander. "Sounds similar, but does this really look like a 65-year-old actor?"

"He's sixty-five?" Xander asked. "Wow. Time does fly, I guess."

"Xan?" The other woman said. "Kinda drifting from the point here."

"Oh. Right. Sorry, Faith. Anyway, Panos here is going to call Amanda and say he escaped in the chaos and ask what he should do next. Normally we'd try to make sure she doesn't know where we are, but she already knows, so we're not going to bother hiding that."

"Actually," Birkhoff said, "if Amanda's working with the Shop, she might have access to the kind of equipment that could let her pin down exactly where Panos is calling from within a few feet. And if he's going to be calling from right here –"

He didn't need to finish the sentence. "Okay then, Shaggy, you up for handling that end of things?"

"Shaggy?"

Nikita said with a small grin – and God it was good to see her smile, even for a second – "Faith gives everyone nicknames."

"Yeah, but Shaggy? I'm not that hairy."

"Not that kind of shaggy, dude," Faith said. "Like the one in Scooby-Doo. You kinda look like the actor who played him in those movies."

Well, he didn't see it, but he wasn't about to argue with someone who could stuff him through a mail slot. He'd yet to quite figure out what was going on here, but he was fairly sure groups of teenaged girls with medieval weapons didn't usually manage to fight off attack squads of heavily armed mercenaries without there being some serious combat training going on.

What kind of combat training that was, he couldn't tell, and his attempts to subtly pump Willow for information had been useless; one, she was distracted by the revelation that her mom was a supervillain, two, she was distracted by trying to track her down, and three, she was scarily smart, easily bright enough to figure out what he was doing and fend him off.

"If you say so," Birkhoff said. "Anyway, yeah, sure, I'll try to keep any probes bouncing from here to Abu Dhabi and back again. You do realize that the shop'll have someone doing the same thing, right?"

"No one as good as Willow," Xander said confidently.

Willow, in the meantime, was typing furiously, and snatched the phone from Michael's hands before plugging it into the USB port of her computer.

"Hey," Michael said mildly.

"Sorry!" Willow said. "It's just that, if we're going to track her down using his phone, I kind of need to decrypt it and make sure everything's speaking the same language, and it's easier to do that if I can plug it directly in." She said all this while still typing; Birkhoff looked over her shoulder and saw what she was doing – huh. Neat trick. He'd have to ask her how she did that in case he needed to do it in the future.

"Okay,"she said, unplugging the phone and handing it back to Michael. "We're good to go."

"Actually," Birkhoff said. "Might be helpful if I had that info too – oh. Thanks." What he'd need to help confuse anyone tracing the call had just popped up on his screen. He jumped in. One minute . . . okay. I'm good."

"Just want to be clear," Faith said to Panos. "No tricks, no funny business, and speak in English so we can all understand you."

"I speak Greek," Michael said.

"So do I," Willow said, which didn't surprise Birkhoff at all, not even when she said, "Well, Attic Greek, anyway. I'm not so good on the modern version."

"Me too," Nikita said. "Modern, anyway. I don't know the ancient stuff."

"So do I," Willow said, which didn't surprise Birkhoff at all, not even when she said, "Well, Attic Greek, anyway. I'm not so good on the modern version." As for Birkhoff, foreign tongues weren't his strong suit he knew a bit of Spanish, and he could swear in Russian, and that was about it.

"You do not speak it well," Panos said to Nikita. "I would not speak Greek to Amanda anyway. She doesn't understand it."

"Okay, then. We all set?" Faith asked. Everyone said variations of yes. "Cool. Xan, take the door, let me know if anyone comes running down the hall or it looks like the shit's hit the fan with those dudes in the classroom."

Snapping off a mock salute, Xander said, "Aye-aye, captain!" and left the room.

Faith and Michael moved to the far side of the room along with Panos, while Nikita stayed a few feet behind them.

"Okay," Faith said. "Everyone quiet. Ready, Red?"

"Yup," Willow said.

"Shaggy?"

For a second Birkhoff thought about refusing to answer until Faith called him by his real name, but quickly decided that right before a delicate op wasn't the time to throw a hissy fit. So, sighing, he said, "Ready."

He'd throw the hissy fit later.

"Awesome. Panos, three, two, one . . ."

Panos dialed.


	16. It's a Trap!

Understandably, the Shop was not happy with the possible attention Amanda's abortive attack had the potential of bringing on them. On a practical level, she understood why, although she still felt it to be a breach of their agreement for them not to support her.

"This has put us into quite a predicament," one of them said. "You have forced us into a possible confrontation with a group we very much wanted to stay off the radar of."

"They trashed us once," another said. "We were lucky to escape with our lives and even a small portion of our notes. Walsh was a madwoman."

Amanda had met Maggie Walsh a couple of times. An excellent psychologist, but with traces of monomania and a disturbing lack of sensitivity to the well-being of those around her. Not that Amanda cared on an emotional level, but for the sake of practicality, it was better to have the people with whom you worked reasonably happy, and certainly with no reason to be angry at you. Walsh had never learned this, or taken care of her monomania, and in the end it had gotten her killed.

"Nikita was already coming after you," Amanda said.

"We can handle Nikita," a third one said. Amanda raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. A lot of people had believed they could handle Nikita. Percy and Roan, just to name two. They were all dead. And while Amanda believed she of all of them had the best understanding of how to deal with Nikita, even there it was no sure thing. "What we can't handle," he continued, "Is Nikita, and her allies, and dozens of warriors pissed off because we attacked them, and then finding out that we're doing the same things we did back then, only now to human beings. They won't care that what we're doing will help people in the long run; they'll just see people 'suffering,' and if we're lucky they'll find enough of us to bury. These were people who got upset when we experimented on werewolves and demons, for Christ's sake!"

"The mercenaries have no idea where I am," Amanda said. "I met with their leader in York, Pennsylvania – far enough from here that anyone attempting to track me won't have any luck."

"Unless they use magic," the first one said. "That's the problem with you people at Division: You've pretended there was no magic for so long you've forgotten about it yourselves."

She had to admit, he was right about that – at least insofar as her not factoring magic into the possibility of how Nikita might track her down. But Nikita was scarcely more familiar with that world than she was –

And there was Amanda's error. She had internally assumed that, but Nikita had apparently met Slayers and learned enough about them to have some idea of what they were capable of – more even than Amanda, who had had an almost visceral reaction to being manipulated years ago when she had almost burned her daughter at the stake, had not repressed it, but she so loathed being manipulated that she had consciously avoided thinking about that time. It was an overused metaphor, but nonetheless accurate: The puppet master was not supposed to become the puppet.

"Not – forgotten, exactly," Amanda said, "But yes. That was a mistake on my part. Most of our enemies are unaware of magic."

"We don't want them finding us," the second one said. "We only want them finding you. We're aware of our agreement and will not be abrogating it entirely. Our projects downstairs are being cleared out even as we speak. The living ones are being moved to a save location and the remains are being disposed of."

"We are nothing," the first one said, "If not efficient. We have had to move before and are ready to do quickly when forced to. So here's what's going to happen. We are all leaving. You are remaining behind. A guard force will be left behind to protect you, as well as one of our computer personnel."

"The one who was caught planting a camera in my office," a fourth one, an attractive female slightly younger than herself, said.

"Yes, him," the first one said. "The guards have instructions to keep you and be here, in this building, for 48 hours after we leave, or until an attack comes, whichever comes first. Should you escape an attack, we will find you, and resume our business arrangement."

The third one said, "The President will be coming with us. And if you're caught, we'll keep up that particular op and do our best to assure Nikita's capture. We owe you that."

"So I'm being left as a scapegoat," Amanda said.

"Scapegoats are innocent," the first one said. "Guards?"

And two guards, who before now had been stationed behind the head of the table, came around and stood near her. They didn't grab her arms, clap her in irons, or draw their weapons. "Go ahead, do whatever you feel you need to. They have orders not to restrict you unless you try to leave, mention us or call down an airstrike," the second one said. "So –"

Right then, her phone rang. "May I answer this?" she asked acidly.

"Of course," the first one said.

She left the room as the phone continued to ring and turned towards her quarters, the guards trailing two steps behind her. She had no doubt that were she suddenly to break into a run and try to make it out the front door, that she would be caught before she could get ten feet.

She had no intention of doing that. While she didn't consider herself above the brute force method – those who were above anything usually didn't last long in this business – this seemed to be a situation that called for a somewhat more delicate touch.

Caller ID was telling her nothing. She picked up the phone and said, "Amanda here."

X

"Amanda here," came her voice through the speaker.

"This is Panos," the merc said. "I have managed to escape." Faith had to admit, he was playing it cool. He'd been annoyed by Andrew, but Andy'd been trying to annoy him. Dude had bought a clue in the last few years. Still liked to talk his geek talk but was a lot better about making sure people were interested in it first.,

Willow was typing her head off, while Birkhoff was just pressing a couple of keys and shaking his head, looking confused. He didn't look like he was about to break out in a screaming panic, though, and he seemed like the kind of guy who wouldn't hold back from letting you know if the shit was about to hit the fan.

That is . . . surprising, considering what I know about the caliber of your opposition," Amanda said. "How did you manage it?"

"I was lucky," Panos said. "One of my teams was pinned down. Everyone was called to help fight them. In the confusion I slipped into the woods."

"You don't sound like you're running for your life," Amanda said.

"I am resting," Panos said.

"Your physical stamina must be incredible," Amanda said.

Panos said, "I offered to show you once. You declined." Yeah, Faith was pretty sure that meant what she thought it meant. Willow and Nikita both looked vaguely disgusted.

"Not what I meant," Amanda said, sounding vaguely amused. "I meant that you've been fighting or running for most of the last couple of hours, and you don't sound the least bit out of breath. Why is that?"

"It is like you said," Panos said. "I am in excellent physical shape." Well, he wasn't paunchy or anything, but he sure as shit wasn't buff. You couldn't be in lousy condition to do what these bastards did, but shit, even Batman would've been breathing heavy after doing what Panos was supposed to have been doing.

"Let me guess," Amanda said, although her voice got quiet. "You're still a prisoner; their computer expert is trying to track me; and they promised not to feed you your own fingers if you played along."

Panos looked at them, unsure of what to say. Michael spun his finger in the "get going" gesture. Nikita than drew her gun and pointed it at him. Eyes widening, Panos sputtered into the phone. "It's nothing like that, and I'm surprised you would ask."

"Yes it is," Amanda said calmly. "And I can save you the trouble. By now, if your computer person is any good at all, they've pinned my location down to somewhere in Laurel, Maryland. I am in the seemingly abandoned Laurel Center. Technically, underneath."

Everyone looked over to Willow, who nodded her head and mouthed, "Somewhere in Laurel, anyway." Birkhoff called up some kind of map program and located the Laurel Center on it.

Faith, Nikita and Michael looked at each other and mouthed a quick conversation, and finally Nikita said, "And we should trust you because?"

"Hello, Nikita," Amanda said. "I assume you've caught up with my erstwhile employee."

"Cut the crap, Amanda. Why are you telling us where we can find you?"

"I thought you might like to meet some of my friends," Amanda said. "The ones who used to work for something called The Initiative?"

Abruptly, Willow stopped typing and said, "You're involved with them?" Faith had been comatose, attempting to commit suicide by vamp, or imprisoned for most of Buffy and company's involvement with the Initiative, but she damn well knew the people in charge had basically been sons of bitches, the lot of them.

"One does what one has to, dear," Amanda said. "Excuse me, my guards are wondering why I'm muttering. See you soon . . ."

And the connection broke. "First things first," Faith said firmly, quelling whatever everyone in the room except Birkhoff was about to say. Opening the door, she found Xander leaning against the far wall. "Come on back. We're done."

"Yeah, they 're done down the hall, too," Xander said. "They eventually decided to try to blast their way out. It didn't work."

"Any casualties?"

"Holly broke her ankle dropping in on them from the ceiling. Other than that, bumps and bruises. Our guests weren't so lucky. They're headed their way to the infirmary with a nasty assortment of broken bones. Gigi was not nice to them."

"People like this don't deserve nice," Nikita said, then glared at Panos, practically double-dog-daring him to say anything.  
Panos was smart enough not to, instead simply handing the phone to Faith while staying quiet.

"Okay. Good. Amanda figured out what we were up to inside a minute."

"Really," Xander said flatly, glaring at Panos.

"Don't blame him," Michael said. "For that, anyway. He sold it as best he could."

"Okay . . ." Xander said, now a bit confused.

Faith moved over behind Willow and Birkhoff, looking at their screens. "We got confirmation?"

"We didn't hold her long enough to pin it down exactly," Willow said. "But the Laurel Center's dead center in the zone I narrowed it down to. If she isn't there, she's close."

"So why in the living hell would she tell us where she was?" Faith asked. "And that the people she was working with used to be in the Initiative?"

"Not to get all Admiral Ackbar on the situation, but 'It's a trap!" springs to mind," Xander said.

But Nikita was shaking her head. "I don't think so. Amanda wouldn't be nearly this obvious."

"Yeah, her traps are a lot more subtle," Birkhoff said.

"You heard what she said about guards?" Michael said. "I think she and the Shop might have had a falling out."

Xander said, "And she knows that we hated what the Initiative stood for and, finding out that some of the bastards who ran that place are still somehow breathing, she's baiting – not you guys, Nikita – she's baiting us. She wants us to come charging in there."

"Because she knows then that she won't be your priority, whatever's left of this Initiative will be," Nikita said. "She's probably hoping to slip out in the confusion."

"Ain't gonna happen," Faith said. "Though we are going to have to do something about the Shop, anyway. Okay. Red, let everyone know we've got a situation and to meet back in the War Room in five. Nicky, you guys pick up your girl Alex and join us there. We'll drop Panos off with his boys along the way."

"You said we would be released," Panos said.

"We didn't say we were letting you go right away, either," Xander said. "Keep your pants on, buttercup. You'll be out of here soon enough."

"Yeah, we're sure as shit not cutting you loose where you can regroup and come back after us," Faith said.

They left. Within ten minutes (it took Nikita and Michael a few extra minutes to track down Alex, who'd raced down the hall to help out with the mercs' breakout try and was still there helping with the mop-up) Faith, Xander, Giles, Robin, Claudia, Willow, Nikita, Michael, Alex and Birkhoff were in the room.

"Okay, guys," Faith said, after they'd explained everything. "There we go. What do we do now?"


	17. I Love My Mom

Author's note: I've slightly edited the end of the last chapter. Remove Claudia from the meeting. Insert Ryan Fletcher.

XXXXXX

_mommy why_

_are you really angry_

_i don t know_

_what is the matter with me_

_you make me cry_

_and i need your love_

_and i love my mom_

- _I Love My Mom,_ The Roches

XXXXXX

Nikita started, "I've got my own grievances with the Shop – they nearly got Michael killed – but they're not my priority."

"Or any of ours," Alex said. "We want Amanda. Preferably dead." Willow flinched at that.

Birkhoff nodded in agreement, and Michael said, "Not that we wouldn't like to drive them out of business. They experiment on people. And they helped Amanda frame Nikita."

"Which would explain why they have managed to remain beneath our radar," Giles said. "The Initiative as originally constituted did their experiments on individuals they believed non-human, and therefore, unworthy of ethical considerations. Vampires are evil –"

Alex said, "Whoa. Vampires?"

Right. No one had ever told Alex about the supernatural. Or Birkhoff, for that matter, though he didn't look like he was having nearly as much of a problem with it. Ryan had obviously been read in somewhere along the way.

"We don't really have time for the full speech right now," Robin Wood said. "Magic is real, vampires are real, demons are real, werewolves are real."

"Will?" Xander asked. "You up for a quick demo on the magic part at least?"

Willow stood up and, muttering a couple of words in Italian, drew the name "Alex" in the air in sky-blue calligraphy, then sat back down. "Good enough?" she said, in tone that implied it had damn well better be. Xander leaned over and said something to her Nikita couldn't hear.

When Alex hesitated before answering the question, Nikita said, "Even if you're not convinced, trust us. It's all real. We'll give you a longer explanation later. Promise."

Alex didn't look happy, but she said, "Alright."

"As I was saying." Giles said, "Vampires are almost universally evil, and we disapprove of experimentation on even them. A Slayer's job is to kill vampires, not to brutalize or torture them. As for the rest, not nearly every supernatural being in the world is evil, which is what made what the Initiative did so appalling. Why they think we'd countenance their remnants using humans for their test subjects instead of demons, I have no idea."

Nikita had been thinking about this. "I do," she said. "When I was in training, Division told us about vampires and demons – but it was literally a one-day training course. Basically, "If you see something like this, run, and tell someone in authority at the first available opportunity. We deal with humans, and humans only. And here, you don't deal with renegade humans all that much, right? That Russian mob thing was just like the situation today – a fluke. Right?"

"They ain't flukes," Faith said, "But I wouldn't put them anywhere in the top ten, either."

"And those that you do pay attention to tend to be involved in magic or the supernatural in some fashion. You don't stop muggers. Am I right?"

Giles said, "You are, by and large. We are not the police; we are not even superheroes –"

"Though if Andrew had his way we'd all be wearing costumes," Xander said.

"You agreed with him!" Robin said.

"Hey, spandex. What's not to like?"

"In any event," Giles said firmly, "In general, you are correct. We do not worry about human-on-human crime. We are not so callous as to pass up a crime being committed directly in front of us, but we leave the investigations to the actual police. Who are far more competent than our experiences with those in Sunnydale would have made us believe."

"Corrupt?" Michael asked.

"Half directly under the Mayor's thumb, half so incompetent you couldn't have trusted them to spot a crime being committed directly in front of them," Xander said.

"And that's why," Nikita said. "They figure that by sticking to experimentation on humans that they're not going to run into you."

"And in general, they were correct," Giles said. "None of us here had so much as an inkling that the scientific remnants of the Initiative were still active and working together."

"I'm surprised Smallville didn't clue us in," Faith said.

"Smallville?" Birkhoff asked. "Don't tell me Superman's real too."

"Faith is referring to an acquaintance of ours in the military – one who was involved in the military end of the Initiative. I would be very much surprised if the Colonel knew anything about it, though, because if he had, he would have informed us, if only after the fact. The Colonel would be, if anything, even more appalled than we were, because –"

Xander said, "He's not just an agent in the gene-tampering club for men, he's also a client."

"They experimented on him too," Alex said with disgust.

"He's lucky he's still alive," Willow said; her first contribution since drawing Alex's name in the air. She still didn't look happy. Just to be on the safe side, they should probably clear the air about what they intended to do with Amanda/Sheila Rosenberg before they were done.

Michael waved his artificial hand in the air. "They gave me this artificial hand – with a deadly bunch of nanotech inside ready to kill me in minutes if Nikita didn't do exactly as Amanda told her to do. That's when she was told to kill the President."

"Amanda wanted me humiliated, alone, and eventually dead, with my reputation in tatters."

"And," Alex said gently, "It worked."

Nikita turned around to look at her, but any protest died in her mouth before she could say it. Alex was right, except that Nikita wasn't dead. Amanda's scheme might not have gone off exactly according to plan – Nikita had managed to escape, and originally Amanda had wanted to present the public with her corpse and proof of her guilt – but it was close enough. Amanda was nothing, if not inventive, and she had backup plan upon backup plan. Sensing, for instance, that maybe Nikita either wouldn't be able to bring herself to go through with killing the President, or that her friends would figure some way out of it – which they had – she'd somehow set the President up to kill herself, using the very gun Nikita had brought with her. (And if Nikita hadn't, rather stupidly now that she thought about it, put the pistol on the President's desk, there was no doubt another weapon in the room, with Nikita's bleeding corpse readily available to put the necessary fingerprints on.)

So, since Nikita had escaped, Amanda had simply moved on to plan B, which was drawing out the torture.

And she'd come damn close to conceding Amanda's point by running, by shutting herself off from everyone, by taking everything on herself. That love only hurt, it never helped. Because she loved these people and Amanda wanted to show her how wrong that was.

It had hurt to leave. It would have hurt to stay.

"Almost," she finally said. "It would have, except you guys were too stubborn to let me get away with it."

"You gonna be dumb enough to try again?" Alex asked. "'cause next time I might just have to kick your ass." She was grinning as she said it, though.

"No."

After a moment of silence, Giles said, "Well, now that that matter is settled, can we return to what we are going to do about The Shop?"

"And this is more of Amanda's plan," Ryan said.

"How do you mean, Mr. Fletcher?" Giles asked.

"Nikita came here asking for help. You agreed to give it to her. And now you're talking about how and when to go after The Shop instead of Amanda herself."

"Presumably, if we find The Shop, we will find Amanda," Giles said.

"Sure. But then you'll be concentrating on shutting them down, not capturing or killing Amanda."

As Giles nodded his head slowly, Willow said, "Could we please stop talking about killing my mother? I realize she's evil, but I don't want her dead."

"After everything she's done –" Nikita began.

"I know what she's done!" Willow said. "I know what she's done to you; I know what she's done to me for my entire life! I know my father's not really my father! That doesn't matter. Catch her. Throw her into a deep hole somewhere. But she's my mother and I don't want her dead."

And this, even Amanda hadn't planned for – Nikita couldn't imagine she had, at any rate. "I understand that," she said. "But I can't make promises. " Nor would she. She couldn't imagine what Willow was going through, but Amanda was far too dangerous, too evil, too manipulative to be allowed any chance of getting away with everything she'd done.

"None of us can," Alex said.

"And none of us will," Michael said.

"Slayers don't kill humans unless we got no choice," Faith said. "I got no issues if I'm forced to take out some wizard getting ready to bring about a demon apocalypse. I get that you ain't Slayers, though, Nicky. And I get what she's done. And I get that she's your mother, Willow."

"Do you?" Willow said. "Considering your mother –"

Faith blinked. "Low blow." After a second, she said, "But anyway, my mom was a negligent, abusive, drunken bitch, and she was a better mother than yours is. Sure as shit she was a better human being. Least she didn't spend her whole life trying to fuck with as many people as possible. At least she didn't get the freaking president killed."

"She didn't manipulate you for years," Nikita said to Faith, then turned to Willow. "Willow, she's been manipulating you your whole life – and that's one of the least bad things she did."

"I know," Willow said fiercely. "I'm not defending anything she's done. Ever. To me, to you, to anyone. But I can't stand around and watch people kill her."

"Then stay behind," Alex said bluntly.

"Look –" Willow began.

Raising his voice, Giles said, "That is enough. Willow, we have no intention of killing anyone at all, and we cannot control what Nikita and her friends do. These are not the kind of people whose deaths I will waste one second mourning, by and large. That said, it seems we are at an impasse."

"And here's the rest of the bitch's plan," Birkhoff said. "Though I've got to give her credit for pulling this one out of her ass the way she did."

"Enlighten us, Mr. Birkhoff," Giles said.

"Happy to. Look, it'd be one thing if we both attacked at the same time with different objectives – ours to catch or kill Amanda – hypothetically, Willow – and yours to take down the people in the Shop; then we could coordinate, at least. This way? She's just about severed whatever alliance we've had, and almost puts us on opposite sides. At the very least, even though Amanda just had a private army attack this place, not giving a shit about whether they killed anyone in the building except for Nikita and Willow, she's got you focusing on someone else instead of pissed off at her. Trust me, I get how evil The Shop is. I know how important it is to put them out of business."

"And they're not focused on us," Michael said. "And remember, I'm the one they tried to kill." He waved his artificial hand in the air. "Amanda is. If we dropped off the map completely, the Shop would probably do nothing more than tell people to keep an eye out in case we broke cover, and go on about its business. Amanda, on the other hand, actively wants us either dead or wishing we were dead. She would scour the globe top to bottom."

"And we mean that just short of literally," Alex said. "She's probably got connections at McMurdo Station."

"Where?" Xander asked.

"A base in Antarctica," Nikita said. "Really not important right now The important part is that we're not safe from her, so we have to take the fight to her. The Shop – no matter what they're doing – is something we can take our time with. We're not fine with what they're doing, but we have to prioritize."

"As do we," Giles said. "And despite Amanda having been behind the attack, the Shop is committing far greater evils. I realize you are not arguing that point."

Throwing up her hands, Alex said, "Terrific. So Amanda's plan worked."

"No it didn't," Faith said. "Not all the way, anyway."

"What do you mean?" Robin asked.

"Nicky came to me for help," Faith said. "I promised I'd give it to her and I'm planning on sticking to my word. Rest of you want to take the folks in the Shop down, have it at. But Nicky did us a massive solid back when she helped us get the Russian mob to back off and I'm still figuring we owe her one." She glared at Giles, Robin, Xander, and Willow, daring them to take issue with what she'd said.

As for Nikita, she was surprised and happy to hear Faith say that. That had been all she'd been hoping for when she came here – God, only 18 hours ago.

As it turned out, no one argued with Faith. "Of course," Giles said. "I wouldn't expect otherwise. In fact, it might be preferable – that way we can maintain communications between the two groups, and at the very least, coordinate."

"I'm going with you, too," Willow said.

Xander immediately said, "Maybe not such a good idea, Willow . . ."

"If I go with them," Willow said tightly. "Then I can make sure they don't kill my mother."

Everyone looked at Xander, who, after a second, rolled his eyes and said, carefully, "I think what we're worried about is . . ."

"I know what you're worried about," she said. "Look at me. See? No dark. Dark Willow has left the building. I'm ticked and upset, not blinded by rage. Okay?"

Which matched Nikita's opinion, but she didn't know Willow nearly as well as these people did. Honestly, she wasn't particularly interested in having her come with them, both for the reason that she might be a problem if they did need to kill Amanda, and that she wasn't exactly a trained agent.

Since no one seemed ready to answer Willow's questions, Nikita raised the objection. "Can you handle yourself in a fight?"

"Do you need me to blast out the front of this room with a lightning bolt?" the witch asked.

"I would prefer you didn't," Giles said.

"Yeah. 'cause I'm the one who usually has to clean it up," Xander said.

"Well?" Nikita said, after thirty seconds or so of uncomfortable silence. "That's not quite an answer to the question."

"And firepower and the ability to use it," Michael said, "Isn't quite the same as the ability to handle yourself. We don't mean this as an insult –"

"No, the part you mean as an insult is the part whether you're wondering whether you can trust me not to attack you while your backs are turned so my mother will be safe. I don't love her that much. I want her brought to account for everything, same as you. I'm not going to hurt you. Okay?"

She sounded sincere. Nikita still had misgivings about this, but help that wanted Amanda alive was better than no help at all.

"And if we say no?" Ryan asked.

"I'll come anyway," Willow said. "And I'll be invisible."

Nikita said, "Welcome to the team."


	18. The Amanda Show

The guards here were not the brightest, Amanda thought, but even they had figured out that possibly she might be up to "no good" in the middle of a conversation said in hushed tones while facing away from them.

They didn't appear to have actually heard what she'd said, or she would have no doubt been thrown into the rapidly emptying dungeon, left there with the cooling bodies of those test subjects deemed not important enough to move. Fortunately, Amanda's estimate of the guards' lack of perspicacity seemed to have been accurate – as soon as she disconnected her phone and smiled at them, they backed off.

"Shall we, gentlemen?" she said, favoring them with the most dazzling smile she could muster.

"Shall we what?" The tall one – the name on his badge read "Kirkpatrick" – said.

"Shall we go?" Amanda said.

"Go where?" the short one – Gordon – said.

That Amanda refrained from rolling her eyes in the face of such mind-numbing stupidity surely would have earned her a Best Actress award, if they bothered to give such things out to people in her kind of work.

"Since I'm assuming your instructions are not to allow me anywhere outside –" A brief not indicated that she was correct in this assumption – "then I'm simply going to go back to my room. If that's alright with you?" She smiled again.

"No problem," Kirkpatrick said. "Long as you don't try to leave or shoot no one, we're good."

"I have no plans to shoot anyone," she said. Which was absolutely true. That didn't mean she might not be forced to, under certain circumstances, but she certainly wasn't intending to shoot anyone at the moment, not even Nikita.

She walked back to her quarters, Kirkpatrick and Gordon following about ten feet behind her. When she arrived at her suite she turned on her computer and used the security camera to follow the progress of the emergency evacuation in progress. This did not involve hacking; anyone on the Board, a level she had achieved temporarily, had such access. Some of the board members were voyeurs. Amanda honestly did not care about people's sexual activities except as they revealed information about their psychological state. She used them for their designed purpose: to keep track of what was going on, and where.

Seeing the exodus, she was impressed with its relative orderliness, if nothing else. She was somewhat surprised; while the Shop was largely run by pure scientists such as herself, most of them did not give the impression of people who would handle pressure well. Truth be told, she had expected panic to have set in by now, though not blind, screaming panic; more the kind of panic where people throw things into the nearest suitcase/gym bag/briefcase and take off at speeds well above the posted limit, only pausing to determine what they were going to do next when they believed themselves safe.

Instead, while there were some signs of panic among isolated individuals, the withdrawal as a whole was proceeding as smoothly as anyone could have hoped.

This would not do. She expected the bombshell she dropped to cause some discussion at the Unbroken Academy – she had to ask Willow, once this was over, about the origin of that name – and for them to take a couple of hours to get here, but if they delayed too long, then all the invaders would find would be her, a terrified tech guy, a dozen or so security guards who, though dumb, were not dumb enough to believe they had been left behind as anything but cannon fodder, and an array of corpses in the dungeon that Nikita would delight in blaming solely on her.

No. She had to delay this retreat.

Powering down her computer, she stood up and walked from her personal office, through her bedroom, to her bathroom. "Surely," she said to Kirkpatrick and Gordon, "You're not following me in there."

"No, ma'am," Gordon said. "You are going to have to leave the door open. We don't have to watch, though."

"Speak for yourself," Kirkpatrick said. "I plan on seeing everything." The tone on his voice made it clear he was saying this less because of a thorough devotion to duty and more because he wanted to see her naked.

"I would sooner go in my pants," Amanda said, "than have one of you watch me." She didn't have to go to the bathroom at all, of course. But she could do nothing to delay things here if she couldn't shed her two guard dogs. She could, in theory, place another phone call, but she doubted she'd have the same opportunity again she'd had earlier. And besides, there was no one she could call. Anyone who might be convinced to interfere with a bit of play-acting – such as the local police – would only interfere with any attack the Slayers and Nikita would be making.

Gordon said, "Knock it off, Kirk. Leave the door cracked about a foot and we'll wait across the room. Good enough?"

"It will do, yes," Amanda said. Of course it would, and thank god – or whatever - for people such as Gordon, full of such misguided chivalry. She walked over to her bathroom, left the door open exactly a foot, and sat down on the toilet. After a minute she stood up and turned on the faucet, making hand-washing noises while she quietly opened up her medicine cabinet.

Anyone who would have thought her medicine cabinet would only contain the usual contents – aspirin, a stomach remedy, Midol, cortisone cream – would have been greatly surprised. In addition to the above – she did occasionally get headaches, after all – were several doses of drugs she used in her psychiatric capacity. Sertraline wouldn't particularly help her right now, but one of the soporifics might – ah. There it was. She reached for a washcloth.

A few minutes later, Gordon knocked on the door. "Everything okay?" he asked.

"No," she said, in as pained a tone as she could manage. He immediately pushed the door open, and, holding her breath, she brought the washcloth to his face, shoving it over his face and nose.

Startled, he scarcely had time to struggle before sinking, unconscious, to the bathroom floor. Amanda looked over at the vial she'd procured from the medicine cabinet and smiled. Good old CHCl3.

The classic methods, she reflected, were classics for a reason.

Before Kirkpatrick had time to react, she swiftly bent down and pulled Gordon's pistol from its holster, pulled the door open as far as she could, and stepped back into her bedroom. A startled Gordon was just beginning to realize something was wrong, and was halfway through both a step towards the bathroom and drawing his own weapon. He stopped once he realized that Amanda, in the parlance, had the drop on him. "Step back against the wall," she said. "And throw your weapon on the bed."

He stopped mid-step, flattened himself against the room's far wall, and carefully pulled out his gun. For a second it seemed like he was considering trying to draw it on her, but a look into Amanda's eyes apparently clarified things for him, and he simply tossed it onto the bedsheets. "Okay," she said, dropping the chloroform soaked washcloth, "Come over here, pick up the washcloth, and press it against your face. I want it covering both your nose and your mouth."

Then she moved over to the bed, picked up the other pistol, and covered him as he moved. "What's on there?" he asked while picking up the washcloth.

"Does it matter?" Amanda asked. "It's either hold it your face, or get shot. Either way, I'm not leaving the room while either of you is conscious. It's your choice whether you wake up."

He looked backwards at Gordon lying on the floor, saw that he was still breathing, and said, "You ain't getting away with this." Then he put the cloth up to his face, took two breaths, and collapsed.

Unless Kirkpatrick knew a lot more about medicine than he appeared to, he was out. Years of practice had taught Amanda the signs of when someone was genuinely unconscious or whether they were faking. There were signs someone trained could look for, and he had displayed every one of those signs.

Alas, they did not carry handcuffs, and she had no particular desire to shoot them where they lay. First, someone might hear the shots, even in the controlled chaos of the move; and two, should she be recaptured, she didn't want to have any of the guards angered with her because she'd killed their cohorts.

Still, she didn't want to simply leave them there, free to act when they woke up on their own. So she decided to delay their awakening as long as she could. Holding her breath, she soaked the washcloth with a bit more chloroform, placed it over Kirkpatrick's nose, and left the open bottle a foot away from Gordon's head. Then she confiscated their cell phones and destroyed them.

Making her way to the front door of her suite, she peered out the door. The hallway wasn't empty, but there were neither guards nor board members scurrying about. This, then, was about as clear a coast as she was likely to get.

Boldly, she walked out and turned left. Where could she go to cause the maximum amount of confusion and delay the evacuation as long as possible? She quickly considered her options. Messing with the computers was out. She was proficient at their use, but no more. Simply shooting everyone she ran across was out of the question, of course. It would be absurdly easy to follow a trail of bodies, and besides, she wasn't particularly bloodthirsty.

Explosions would have left the place in chaos, but she didn't have any explosives handy. Nor was she an expert in their use.

Then it hit her. Buried as the Shop's headquarters were beneath an abandoned shopping mall, they could not leave dozens of vehicles in the overgrown parking lot, so they had an underground parking garage.

The garage had one entrance to the outside. There were a variety of ways to leave on foot, of course, but a mass exodus on foot stood a greater chance of being detected by the local authorities, and also would force them to leave most of their projects, and computers, behind.

That settled it. The complex had several elevators, and she moved towards the nearest passenger car. Normally, were she attempting to remain inconspicuous, she would have used the freight elevators, but at a time like this they would be used almost constantly by people desperate to make sure their pet projects or the notes attached thereto wouldn't be left behind, or, more likely, destroyed by some self-destruct mechanism. She presumed the Shop had one; they would be fools not to.

Of course, she had considered simply making her way to one of the alternative exits and leaving, leaving Nikita with an empty bag and the Slayers with a substitute target and little inclination to chase directly after her; but, should that happen, there was every chance the Shop, or at least the majority of its leadership, would escape, and while this would still draw the Slayers off her trail, it would not punish the Shop for having betrayed her.

No. That would never do. She blamed this debacle at least partly on them, for not having giving her the full story of their origins once she had been, ostensibly, brought on board as a full partner in their operations. Most of the remainder was the fault of Panos and his team, for attacking before she gave the signal. She admitted that possibly she should have done more to figure out where Nikita had gone in that time between when she left Division and when she resurfaced, but she couldn't have imagined she would end up entangled in the supernatural.

Perhaps her daughter could have informed her, had Amanda – or "Ira—" maintained the lines of communication, but speculating on what could have been was a pointless mental exercise. Willow was accomplished and successful, proving Amanda's hypothesis, but hostile to her, and even more so now that she was aware of Amanda's actual occupation.

Here was the elevator. There were two other people on it, one with an armload of paper files, one carrying a piece of equipment, neither paying much attention to her, but as she recognized neither of them, she presumed neither would be able to identify her, either, much less know that she was supposed to be in custody.

Her presumption, as it turned out, was accurate. For cover, she stepped back and let them enter the garage first.

And here was where things were at their most chaotic. Not "the boat is sinking, jump for your lives" level, but not quite the level of organization seen in the rest of the building, either. People were putting equipment and papers into various cars and speeding off up the exit ramp, which, parallel to the entrance ramp, spiraled up a couple of hundred feet to the surface, where it came out in the service bay of an abandoned Sears auto center.

Each ramp was large enough at most for a van. Which meant that two cars – one per ramp - could easily block off vehicle access to the surface for a good period of time, provided the vehicles were abandoned and the keys nowhere to be found.

She would provide those cars.

Her vehicle was a nondescript Volvo in the middle of the lot – silver. It did not stand out. She picked her way out, carefully, trying to avoid looking as though she were trying to be inconspicuous, pulled out, and got in line.

Five minutes later, she was at the bottom of the ramp, an area that normally would have been closely monitored by a security guard. Under the circumstances, the guards were directing traffic more than securing the area, and the guard didn't even bother looking at her before waving her through. She drove up, slowly, waiting until she was about two thirds of the way up the ramp before she stopped her car.

Less than a minute later, she heard the driver behind her honking their horn. Holding her hands up in apology, she got out of her car and walked back to it, saying how sorry she was right up to the point when the driver rolled down the window, which is when Amanda leveled the pistol at her. "Keys, please," she said.

"What is this?" the woman asked.

"A stickup," Amanda said, deadpan. "Out of the car. And hand me your keys." She cocked the gun. "Are you going to make me ask you again?"

The woman didn't, giving Amanda the keys and stepping out of the car. Smiling, Amanda said, "Thank you," and then shot out both front tires.

In a nice coincidence, another car pulled up right then and the driver stepped out, saying "What's going on here?"

Amanda went through the same routine with him, and finished by locking them both in the trunk of the other woman's car. Then she drove up the ramp, circled around, told the guard running things at the top that she forgot something, and drove back down. About a third of the way down – just out of sight of the previous two cars – she stopped the vehicle, got out, slashed her own tires – she might need to save the bullets – and walked back down the ramp.

In a stroke of good luck, the traffic problem hadn't reached the garage yet – though she heard someone sprinting down the exit ramp, so that state of affairs was unlikely to last long.

She made her way through the chaos and went up in the first open elevator.

Time to head topside, keep an eye out for Nikita or the Slayers, and enjoy the show.


	19. Changing the Subject

Things had gone a lot more smoothly ever since the question of whether they were going to kill Amanda had been "settled." Though Faith was pretty damn sure all "settled" actually meant was "let's not piss Willow off," at least from Nikita's POV.

While the war room was actually living up to its name – prep took a few minutes, plus they had to track down Claudia from wherever she'd gotten to (girl was a military genius; there was a reason she ran tactical most of the time when they were doing mass ops like this one) – she went over to Nikita and Alex and said, quietly, "Nicky. Al. Just want to be sure you guys know that just flat-out bluffing Willow isn't a good idea. If you're going in this with the idea that you're going to kill her mom whatever goes down, then you better make sure one of you has a bazooka in your pocket, 'cause that's the only way you're going to stand a chance of living through the day."

"We're not," Nikita said. "We've got the attitude that we're not going to bend over backwards to avoid doing it, but we're not going to go out of our way to do it, either." That was probably the best compromise they were going to get, under the circumstances.

Alex clearly wasn't happy with this. "Al? Got something you feel like sharing?"

She was shaking her head. "I don't like it. As long as Amanda's alive, she has a chance to get away with everything. She's manipulated me. She's manipulated everyone. She got the freaking President to kill herself, somehow. She doesn't deserve that chance."

"I agree," Nikita said. "We were forced into this compromise, Faith. We don't like it. We'll live up to our end of it, but we're not going to be happy. Alex?"

"You're right. I'm not going to be happy." Nikita and Faith glared at her, and she said, "But I won't blow her head off unless I have a really good excuse."

"Good enough?" Nikita asked.

"Guess it'll have to be." Truth be told, she got where Nikita and Alex were coming from, and Willow was the only reason she wasn't completely backing them up. It wasn't just 'cause you had to keep Willow happy or hope you had the Avengers on speed-dial, though that was part of it. She liked Willow – girl had never once been less than honest about how she felt about her, whether that was hate or friendship. And if she wanted her Mom taken alive, then Faith would try to make it happen.

Wouldn't waste a second mourning if the day ended with the bitch bleeding out, though.

The planning session was short and sweet. Willow was going to map the place magically and find ways inside, Birkhoff (linked up with Sonya, who'd finally been let in on exactly what the hell was going on) was going to try to hack in and find their floor plan and security arrangements, and Giles, Claudia, and Robin were going to be mission control, with Claudia on the computers. She wasn't a Willow-level hacker, but she was pretty good.  
They had three dozen Slayers on the grounds. Ten were staying behind, not counting Claudia the injured Holly, both in case of nearby supernatural emergency and to make sure that Panos and his boys didn't try to get rowdy. Steph and a handful of other witches were going with them; Andrew, who was pretty good at the magic thing, was going to be in charge of the spellcasters left behind.

Willow and Birkhoff found multiple entrances; one looked to be for cars and stuff while the rest were for people on foot, including one that opened up a hundred feet off the property in a storage shed behind a hardware store. That was the one she, Willow, and Nikita's crew were going to take; it was also the only one that stood a good chance of surprising anyone, since all the other entrances were in or near the abandoned Laurel Center itself, which meant crossing at least a quarter mile of empty parking lot in every direction.

Sonya'd seen, by hacking into some kind of satellite feed, some cars leaving the place by what looked like some kind of old automotive bay, but hadn't seen any in about ten minutes. Still, if there were people leaving, then they needed to get over there as soon as possible. Nikita's team would head over there now, and Gigi's team would follow within about fifteen minutes – giving them enough time to get inside and cause trouble, maybe drawing attention from the rest of the team coming in – though, if they were abandoning the place, Faith wasn't sure how much they'd be keeping an eye out for possible attacks, but better that the girls not have to try to dodge gunfire, even if the witches with them were going to adapt that slowdown shield Willow'd whipped up this morning.

The plan for the group Faith was in was pretty much the definition of short and sweet. Go in. Find Amanda. Bring her out. Beat answers out of her. Kick the ass of anyone who got in the way. They might need a bit more when it came to tactical, but that's what they had mission control for.

"Look," Nikita said. "We have guns. We might have to kill some of the Shop's soldiers if they start shooting at us. None of us likes killing, but it's not something we're going to shy away from, either. If this is going to be a problem, let us know now."

"As your policy," Giles said, "Appears not to be, "Shoot anything that moves," I believe there will not be an issue."

"Good."

They left, taking one of the Academy SUVs. Ryan drove. Nikita stayed in the back, behind the tinted windows. Not that it was public knowledge that Nikita was the one the cops would be looking for for the presidential assassination framejob, but better safe.

They pulled into a supermarket parking lot about a block or so away from Laurel Center about a half hour later.

The hardware store was in the lot right next door. They walked over, and as they walked into the hardware store – which was unmanned, though the sign in the front window said the place was open – Nikita told Birkhoff they were there and about to go in.

"Got it," she said. To everyone else, she said quietly, "The other group left there about sixteen minutes ago."

"We better hustle, then," Faith said.

They went through the store and out the back door – going around would've meant scaling a fence, east enough for all of them, including Willow, but a lot more likely to draw attention from people passing by. Yeah, a lot of people didn't want to get involved, still, or didn't see what they were seeing 'cause it didn't make sense, but folks breaking in to a hardware store didn't rate on that scale.

When they walked out the back, though, they got an unpleasant surprise – there was a guy were leaving the shed, and it was pretty obvious from the pistol he was carrying that he wasn't there looking at bricks for his backyard patio.

Fortunately, the pistol was tucked into his waistband and he was carrying armloads of paper, so it wasn't exactly hard to get the drop on him. "Oh, fuck," he said.

"Hi," Nikita said, smiling. "How busy's the way you just came?"

"Not at all," he said.

Turning to look at Michael, Nikita said, "He's lying. Shoot him in the kneecap and see if that'll make him tell the truth."

Getting hit in the knee hurt like a son of a bitch; unless this guy had the pain threshold of a bull elephant all he'd do after being shot in the knee was screaming and crying. Didn't mean he knew that, though, and as Michael cocked the pistol and aimed at the dude's kneecap from maybe two feet away, he said, "Really! Most of the other people have too much to carry. Only reason I'm here is because some bitch blocked off our exit ramps."

Willow asked, "Hey. Is this bitch's name Amanda?"

"The fuck would I know?" he said. "Red hair, hot if you like the cold, evil type. Looks like she'd make a good dominatrix. That who you're looking for?"

"That's her," Nikita said. "Thanks!"

Alex then clocked the guy in the side of the head, took his weapon, and she and Ryan and dragged him behind a stack of lumber. Faith grabbed the papers he'd been carrying and asked Michael, "Any reason to keep these?"

"Cops might like a look at them at some point, but we can't afford to take them with us. Why?"

"I'm thinking if these were pages they wanted gone, they probably got shredders that could atomize 'em. So these are things they want to save. So let's trash 'em."

Willow said, "Give me a second," and the papers suddenly flew out of Faith's hands and floated in the air, flipping one by one almost faster than Faith could see into a second stack. "Yeah, there's nothing we need in there," she said, dumping them onto the gravel.

"Cool. Hold on." Faith then took the stack and dumped it down the nearest sewer access, where it plopped into the water below and disappeared. "Okay. Let's go."

She and Nikita were in the lead, with Alex and Willow behind them, and Michael and Ryan bringing up the rear, as they opened the shed door. Everyone had weapons drawn except for Willow; Faith with a crossbow, everyone else with a pistol of some sort. Willow was ready with a half dozen spells, if necessary.

There was a trap door in the bottom of the shed, which, when open, led to a ladder going down about twenty feet. The tunnel below wasn't much like the one they had, but then the Shop had probably had professionals help them build it. In the case of the Academy, they'd had Xander and Slayer muscle, and while Xander's construction experience was enough to keep the tunnels from falling down, they weren't exactly professional level.

This one was. The place was lit, though it wasn't bright; it was more like emergency lighting. And it had an actual floor. Okay, just concrete, but still, it wasn't just packed dirt.

Faith went down first. Good news for the lighting is, they didn't have to either carry their own or bust out the night vision goggles they didn't have. Bad news is, it was easier to hide in the darkness and it only looked like there were a couple of turns, so anyone paying attention could see 'em coming.

"Okay," Faith said. "Look like we belong here. Might be able to get the drop on anyone coming the other way if they don't see weapons in our hands. Al, Tommy, you keep yours drawn, but hidden. Nicky, Mikey: Stow yours."

Faith hid her crossbow and pulled out a throwing knife, instead, and they walked down the tunnel. They didn't run into anyone until they were almost all the way to the end - thing had to be near a quarter mile long and turned at least twice. Birkhoff had given them a five minute warning a few seconds earlier, so this actually worked out; it was time for them to get in there and make some noise.

"What –" the woman began. She wasn't carrying anything visible, so either she was just trying to get the hell out of Dodge, or she was important herself – one of the scientists.

"What are you doing?" Nikita said to the woman.

"I – I was told that the main way out was blocked and that I should leave by the nearest exit," she said.

"Well," Nikita said irritably, "You can't go out that way. There's a lot of local cops up there. Someone apparently decided that it was the perfect day to rob the Hardee's next door. We were just coming back to report."

"Oh," she said. "Okay." She turned around.

"Where do you think you're going?" Nikita demanded.

"Up to the Penney's exit," she said.

"Like hell. We have to go report in, and we've got better things to do than stand around guarding this exit and telling people to go another way. So that's what you're going to do."

"But," she said, with just a little bit of confidence entering her voice, "That's not my job."

"Your job is what I say your job is," Nikita said. "And right now I say your job is to stay here." She leaned inn to where her face was less than a foot from the other woman's. "Do you get me?"

"I get you," the woman said. "But, but, if something happens to my experiments because I'm not there to keep an eye on them, I'll have your head."

Okay. This was one of the actual scientists. Meant she was probably happily doing work on live subjects. Gloves off. Faith stepped forward, but behind her, Willow said, "I've got this." Faith looked up her and nodded. Willow was as pissed as she was, but she had it under control.

"Your experiments?" Willow said. Nikita took a half step forward, but Michael grabbed her wrist. "And what experiments would those be, exactly?"

"Testing an antibiotic. We've got thirty kids with _clostridium difficile _and if we don't get them shots soon some of them could die." That sounded almost human, till she ruined it by adding, "And that would trash several months' worth of work and we'd just have to round up more test subjects. Do you know how hard it is to find good test subjects?"

"If you leave this spot until either of the two of us—" Willow gestured to herself and Nikita – "Tell you you can, you'll be the next test subject. Got it?"

"Got it," the woman said nervously.

"Good." Willow said. "Now let's go report in."

They walked away and left the scientist there.

"As far as I'm concerned," Willow muttered when they were out of earshot, "It would serve her right if she was a test subject. Maybe for something involving dull knives."

"Hear, hear," Alex said.

Holding up a hand, Nikita stopped and said, "Hush." They all stopped. The area where they were was mostly empty, and honestly, it didn't look like it had ever been used all that much. Maintenance tunnels, maybe? Honestly, it didn't look that much different from the access tunnel they'd just walked out of. Looking around, Faith saw a couple of doors, a thin hallway, and a larger hallway – though she couldn't see much of it from where she was standing, she could just see a pair of elevator doors. She concentrated, she could hear the elevators themselves, so she kept an ear out, just in case a platoon of ticked off security guards poured out of them ready to shoot anything that moved.

"Elevator's around the corner," Alex said, pointing to the large hall.

"Thanks," Nikita said. "I know – Birkhoff was just telling me. But that'll take us right up to the main area – lots of fighting, but none of that'll probably get us to Amanda. We're not here to take everyone out."

"Do we even know where to start?" Ryan asked.

"If Amanda was the one who blocked the exits," Faith said, "Then our girl could be anywhere. She ain't going to be blocking escape routes if she's still in good with the people in charge around here."

Michael said, "Terrific. So we have to search an entire underground complex the size of several shopping malls, while they're trying to escape and, at the same time, fend off an attack by a couple of dozen pissed off women, to find someone who specifically set this up so that she could, probably, slip out in the chaos. Hell, she could be halfway to Alexandria by now."

Willow said, "She's not." And she was smiling.

"Okay, Red," Faith said. "What's with the grin?"

Willow said, "Tracking spell time."

"Don't you need something that belongs to the person for that?" Nikita, Michael, Alex and Ryan were all pretty confused, not that Faith could blame them.

"Usually, yeah. You need her hair, or her skin, or her clothes, or something like that. But we have something better." Her grin got wider, and almost evil. "We have me."


	20. A Farewell to Arms

Birkhoff was back in the Unbroken Academy's computer room. Sonya was linked in and they'd slaved one of the Academy laptops to hers, so they could see what she found. A woman in a wheelchair named Claudia was on the other, though she wasn't a hacker; she was mission control for the main force. (She definitely knew her way around a computer beyond "I can Google that."). Mr. Giles and Robin Wood were standing behind them for when command decisions were necessary, and Xander Harris was guiding the cleanup and keeping an eye on the prisoners.

He didn't have a lot of free time between coordinating the forces, talking to Nikita, and talking to Sonya, who was a little ticked that they hadn't clued her in a lot sooner, though relief that everyone was okay and that they'd found Nicky had mitigated her pissed-ness a little. He still expected a talking-to when they got back. But he had some, so he was trying to help Sonya go from the floorplan to other places in the Shop's computers. So far, no joy, though; they hadn't found so much as a maintenance schedule.

Though the floorplan, to be honest, clearly was something a rough draft. It wasn't a sketch on a napkin, but it wasn't a full architectural mockup, either. For one thing, Willow had found five exits to the surface, but the floorplan had six: The one in back of the hardware store, the vehicle exit through the abandoned Sears, one in an outbuilding, and three in the mall itself. The one in the outbuilding wasn't there.  
Neither was the outbuilding.

"set of stairs?" Nicky's voice came through the headset. Damn, she'd asked a question while he'd been woolgathering.

"Repeat that, please," he said.

"Where is the nearest set of stairs?"

He checked the map. They were on the fifth sub-level out of seven. To their north was elevators, and past that a gym, some kind of recreation room, and some storage areas. To their east was nothing much beyond the way they'd come in; to their west was more storage, and to their south was the southern edge of the complex.

"Closest set is past the elevators on the left," he said.

"Gigi's team is T minus about two minutes," Claudia said from behind her.

Birkhoff repeated this to Nikita, who said, "Ask them to hold off for a minute or two. We haven't made any noise yet." Birkhoff repeated this, and then said, "I'm guessing you're going to need a quick escape route any time now?"

"You know me," Nikita said. "I'll give you a signal."

"They're holding," Claudia said.

"What's going on?" Robin asked.

"Nicky and her crew haven't quite had the time to create their distraction. Hold on . . ."

A distant shout of someone saying "Hey!" followed by a gunshot, a minute or so of what sounded like combat, and then, "Okay. They're alerted and a guard's calling in our presence now – okay. Now he's chasing us." There were definite running noises. "We're going up the stairs."

"Get off at the next floor," he said. "It's mostly residential. Head right – there's another staircase a few hundred feet down on the left hand side. If you have to dodge into any of the other doors, think of them like small hotel rooms."

"We're going to try to avoid that," Nikita said. "They'd be able to trap us."

"Okay."

Claudia said, "They're ready to go any time."

An alarm started to blare in the background. "I think they're distracted," Birkhoff said.

Claudia said, "Go?"

Giles said, "Go."

Claudia said into her mouthpiece, "Go!"

XXXXXXX

Amanda had managed to avoid most encounters on her way up to the top of the complex. The few people that had seen her either hadn't known that the rest of the Shop's board were looking for, or didn't care, because they were trying to save their own skins. Self-preservation was a strong motivator. The Shop had connections, but even they would have difficulty surviving, politically, a mass exposure of their works.

Certainly if what Amanda had done were made public, there was a possibility she would be dragged out in the streets and beaten to death. The trouble with the common people was that there were certain things they simply did not understand.

Nor would they ever. That was what made them common.

The one person who had seemed willing to challenge her presence, she had encountered at the base of the passage to the top of the building, and she had bluffed her way past her by sheer force of will. Then she climbed the narrow walkway that wound its way up to the cupola at the top of the mall's empty food court – the highest point in the mall. This had formerly been used by whatever unfortunates had been forced to clean the windows from the outside, but when the Shop had taken over, they had repurposed it as a guard tower – from the top of the mall, you had a clear view in all directions. It was exceptionally difficult to sneak across a quarter mile of parking lot without someone seeing you. Even Nikita would have had a hard time pulling it off.

There was one guard in the tower. Unfortunately, he was Armed, alert, and knew that she wasn't supposed to be out by herself. He started to draw his weapon, but Amanda, prepared, had anticipated this possibility, and already had one of her borrowed pistols out. "I would prefer not to kill you," she said. This was true. She was perfectly willing to if she had to, but dead people couldn't learn.

He didn't answer.

"That doesn't mean I won't," she said. "To avoid that, it would be best if you left, right now, leaving your weapon behind."

"They'll fire me if I leave my post." Ah. Well, that would explain part of it. The Shop, in common with Division, had no real retirement program. When you left, it was, typically, as a corpse.

"Let me guess," Amanda said. "You were volunteered to remain behind to fend off the attacking force while the people in charge left. Correct?"

"Yeah, pretty much," he said.

"I imagine that didn't go over very well."

"It didn't. But it's not like we have a choice, with these chips in our arms. None of us want to die." Interesting. So they used the same technique they'd used on Michael's artificial hand on their own employees. They hadn't used it on her; she had had someone independently verify this.

"And at a time like this, do you think they're paying attention?" she asked. "I imagine they're far more interested in getting out of here with their research intact than they are in counting heads."

He nodded. "Good point. Still - What happens when they do get around to doing a headcount?"

"You'll just have to figure out a way around that," Amanda said. "I'm sure a bright young man like you won't have any problems. Maybe if the people in charge were no longer a concern?"

"Get them before they get me, you mean?"

"That would be one way, yes." That was exactly the message Amanda had hoped the man would take from her words.

"Good idea," he said, and left, heading down the walkway as fast as he could safely run.

Amanda smiled. Sometimes, it was easy.

Then she shut the door, blocked it with the sand-filled buckets the guards used as an ashtray, and began looking off into the distance.

A few minutes later, she heard the internal alarm go off. About thirty seconds later, a small horde of people began approaching the building from a couple of different directions, looking like they were carrying medieval weaponry.

This would do. This would definitely do.

XXXXXX

They'd lingered on that lower level just long enough to attract attention and get the alarm going, then, following Birkhoff's directions, they went up to the next level and weaved their way through a crowd of people carrying everything from computers to cats, trying to make their way to another staircase and out of sight before one of the evacuees actually paid attention to the guards behind them and tried to stop them.

This was the reason Nikita had told everyone to try to be sure to run into the other people as little as possible. In chase scenes in movies, you usually saw the person in front fling things and people into the path of their pursuers, hoping beyond hope that something will slow them up enough to let the runner escape. In the real world, that tended to tick people off and, sometimes, get them to chase you as well. You still did it under the right circumstances, but sprinting through a semi-crowded hallway you were likely to piss people off anyway just by running into them; there was no reason to give them more reason to help the guards.

"Where to?" she asked when they got to the next stairway.

"Down," Birkhoff said. "There's a lot of storage areas below you right now. Place is a maze."

Nikita said to everyone else when they got back down to the floor they'd started on, "Okay. Follow me." They ran down a passageway that looked less like office storage and more like an underground version of a self-storage facility. The "buildings" didn't quite reach all the way to the ceiling, which gave her an idea.

They pulled around a corner just before the guards hit the landing. She tugged on Faith's shoulder and pointed upwards, offering a boost. Faith shook her head, jumped, and pulled herself up to the "roof." Then she flattened herself. Unlike most actual roofs, this one was flat, so there was no cover. Which meant that Nikita would have to provide the distraction.

Alex hit the floor and looked around the corner. "Four of them," she whispered. "Two going left, two coming towards us."

Nikita gestured for Michael and Ryan to go down this hallway towards the next corner. Michael mouthed, "ambush?" and Nikita nodded.

Willow pointed to herself and had a questioning look on her face. "Go with them," Nikita whispered. Willow jogged off, following the two men.

Then, to Alex, she said quietly, "Now let's get their attention." The two of them stepped out to where the guards could see them. Alex said, "Hi, boys," and Nikita said, "Looking for us?"

The guards drew their weapons as Alex and Nikita ran. One of the guards whistled and they came running forward, yelling, "Hold it!"

Which almost never worked. It certainly didn't in this case, as Nikita and Alex were already moving at a good rate of speed down the hallway, wanting to be nearly but almost out of sight by the time the guards rounded the corner.

Their timing was perfect. Nikita went left, past Michael and Willow, while Alex went right, past Ryan. Nikita kept running until she heard the sounds of a scuffle behind her. Turning around, she saw Michael struggling a bit with the guard who'd followed her, while Ryan had his guy knocked out. In the distance, sounds of another struggle lasted about five seconds. She ran up to help Michael, just in case, but her assistance wasn't necessary; Willow placed her hands on the man's face and muttered something, and he collapsed like he'd just been shot.

"What'd you do?" Michael asked.

"Put him to sleep," Willow said.

Ryan and Alex had his guy cuffed already – using the guard's own cuffs. In the meantime, Faith walked up and, smiling smugly, said, "Took all five of you to deal with those two, huh?"

"We don't all have superstrength, Faith," Willow said.

Faith looked down at the sleeping guard and said, "Yeah, and he just took one look at Mikey there and collapsed in fright, right?"

"I admit nothing," Willow said.

"Where are they?" Michael asked.

"Dragged them hallway down. Figured we'd throw them into storage to get them out of our way."

"You got a key?" Ryan asked. "The guards have keychains but I don't know if we want to take ten minutes going through them one by one."

Faith grinned. "We don't need keys. We've got me. Get those two secured –"she pointed over her shoulder –"and I'll take care of find a place to stuff them."

"Carry out your own trash," Nikita said, smiling slightly.

"Hey, I'll take care of that if any of you – not named Willow – think they can get those doors open faster." After a second, "No answer? Thought so," and walked over to the nearest storage unit, and within seconds had it open. "Here we – holy shit."

Alex and Michael were busy cuffing the guards Faith had brought down, but the rest of them walked over to see why Faith had reacted like that.

Nikita felt a blast of cool air when she got there. The unit was refrigerated.

And what it was refrigerating was body parts.

All human.

And, creepiest of all: Only left arms.

"I'd bet," Ryan said, "That if we opened up the rest of these we'd find units dedicated to practically every part of the body."

"Please, let's not try to find out," Nikita said. That was a bet Ryan would win, she was sure. She'd known the Shop was run by heartless bastards, but knowing it and seeing proof were two entirely different things.

"So I'm thinking we just leave the guards' left arms in here," Willow said. Nikita looked at her face, and she was not joking in the least.

"We don't have time for that," Faith said.

"What's going on?" Birkhoff asked.

"You want proof the Shop's evil?" Nikita said. "We've got it right in front of us." Using the camera in her phone, she showed Birkhoff.

The next voice she heard through her earpiece wasn't Birkhoff's, it was Giles'. "Ms. Mears," he said with deadly precision. "Burn that place to the ground."

She completely agreed with the sentiment. "Amanda first. Then burning."

"Understood," Giles said. "But do hurry."

They threw the guards into the unit, cuffed ,and shut and latched the door. "Let's go get Amanda," she said.

"And goddess help anyone who gets in our way," Willow said

XXXXXX

Author's note: That is Nikita's canonical last name. It's why everyone earlier was asking if she was related to Warren.


	21. Wolfensteining

The time for jokes was pretty fucking much over. Not like going after the heirs of the Initiative was ever going to be happy fun times, but seeing what they were capable of? Shit. Another thing proving that having a soul didn't stop you from being outright evil.

She knew about that already, of course; shit, she'd lived it already, but didn't mean it didn't suck to see new evidence.

Nikita said to Willow, "You say you know where Amanda is."

"I do," Willow said.

"Where?"

"About 300 feet up, a bit to my left and front," Willow said. They were still in the storage hall. Ryan was at one end keeping an eye out, while Alex was at the other.

"300 feet up?" Nikita asked.

"Yeah, I know. That means she's out of the complex and somewhere inside the Laurel Center itself."

Into her earpiece, Nikita said, "What's the fastest way to the top?"

The question had been for Birkhoff, but Willow answered. "I blast a hole in the ceiling," she said grimly, "And we fly straight up until we reach her."

"What're the chances of you doing that without going Dark Willow?" Faith asked.

"50-50."

"Not odds I want to play," Faith said.

Sighing, Willow said, "Me either. But this? Very tempting."

"Repeat that, please," Nikita said. "Okay. Thanks." To everyone else, she said, "The vastest way would be take the stairs we just took, but they'll probably be crowded with guards soon enough. And the elevator is out for obvious reasons. So that leaves us heading to the far end, of –" she pointed – "that hall, and going up until we get to the office level."

"Let's go, then." They hurried along the hallway – which seemed quiet; Faith would have thought that in an evacuation they would have been carting this stuff out of here. That they weren't was kind of scary. Meant their thought process was on the order of, "Aaah, leave the body parts behind. We can always go get more."

Some of the storage units were open, though not many of them . A few even had people still unloading things, and while it was tempting them to pound them until they couldn't feel it any more, they'd pretty much agreed that they weren't going to fight anyone who wasn't actually getting in their way.

The definition of "getting in their way" was pretty loose, though, as a couple of people found out who were rounding a corner with a cart full of something when they all hurried by. Alex hit one of them with a punch and pistol-whipped him in the back of the skull when he fell to the floor; he was out by the time he got there.

Faith got the other one herself, and she didn't need to bother with any weapons; one punch from her, pulled a bit because the chick was human, was enough to knock her unconscious. She barely had to break stride.

Shortly after that, as they got near a side doorway that was probably the stairs up, Nikita held up her hand in a "shush" gesture and then made "spread out" motions. Everyone moved to one side or the other of the doorway.

There were people coming down the stairs. A couple of them. ". . . a waste," a female voice said.

"I know," a male voice said. "But we don't have time for all of them. We have the crucial experiments out. Everyone else is just going to have to get the gas."

"At least they won't suffer," the woman said.

"I think this counts as 'in our way," Alex said grimly.

"Damn right," Michael said. Faith yanked open the door and everyone poured into the stairwell. The two never had a chance, not like they deserved one, anyway. Within thirty seconds they were unconscious and tied to the hand rails, their phones broken, and their wallets lifted. (The last part was less to get some ready cash and more to inconvenience them as much as possible.)

"Up now?" Willow asked.

"Up, now." Nikita said.

Their trip upstairs – as fast as Willow could go, and while she wasn't a trained athlete, a decade or so of taking on things a shitload stronger than she was had left her in pretty decent shape – ran them into three more office drone/scientist types, one suit – even underground, they had a dress code, which sucked for them – and a couple more guards. Unfortunately, the guards were a couple stories up.

"There's more of 'em!" one of them said, and began shooting.

"We're going to have to dodge out here," Nikita said. But she was talking mostly to empty air, because Ryan, Willow, Alex and Willow had already opened the nearest door and sprinted into the area beyond.

Faith followed them, and Nikita came in a couple of seconds later, after exchanging a bit more gunfire. "That one's no good," she said into her earpiece.

The area they were in was – different. Looked more like a luxury hotel than anything else. While Nikita was talking to Birkhoff,Faith said, "I don't think we want to be leading a trail of these guys up to Amanda."

Michael said, "Ambush?"

Faith nodded. "Yeah." Michael tapped Ryan on the shoulder and pointed to an open door. Faith kicked down one door and entered a suite – and damn if the place didn't look nicer than anywhere she'd ever lived; shit, it looked bigger than the place Rachel and Monica lived on on Friends – and shut it most of the way, positioning herself to jump whoever came through the door. She heard everyone else keep running down the hall.

A few seconds later, she heard a muttered, "Where are they?" and then some footshifting.

Shit. These guards were smarter than the ones downstairs – and they had guns. Right as she came to the conclusion that she might want to get out of the way, a bullet came through the door, proving her right. The bedroom was to the right. She dove through the doorway as another bullet came through the door. Immediately afterward, one of the guards kicked the door open and came into the room.

Faith didn't hesitate, taking one of her knives and hitting the first guard in in his gun arm. He dropped the pistol and yowled as Faith charged forward, hitting the guard and door simultaneously, trying to knock anyone following this guy back into the hall.

It worked; there was a thud and then a woman began swearing. In the meantime, the wounded guard with no gun was no problem; one punch took care of that.

Shit! More gunfire in the hallway! Faith rolled to her feet, peered through the door crack, and saw one guard down who wasn't going to be getting back up – shots to the head tended to do that – and a third holding up her hands. Relaxing a bit, Faith walked out into the hall –

And swore again. Ryan had been hit and was bleeding from his left arm. She ran out and said, "Tommy!"

Ryan said, "It looks worse than it is."

Faith said, "Good, 'cause it looks like shit."

Everyone else came running down the hall. "What happened?" Nikita asked.

"I didn't see them go past me and a few seconds later I heard them shoot through Faith's door. I waited until they were just heading in before coming out and drawing my weapon on the woman – and that guy, down the hall –" he pointed to the dead guard – "shot at me from maybe fifty feet away. I hadn't even seen him. He started running up and I returned fire. She was smart enough not to try to join in."

The woman said, "I'm not getting paid enough and you wouldn't've shot Jackson if he hadn't shot you first."

"Good," Nikita said. "You get to live, then." They moved back into the suite Ryan had been hiding out in – it was a mirror image of the one Faith had been in.

Willow and Alex tended to Ryan's wounds. Nikita bound the cooperative guard, and Michael, every once in a while, snuck a peek down the hallway.. "This'll look and smell weird," Willow said, getting some kind of paste out of her carry-bag, "But it'll keep the wound from getting infected. Alex. There's a bandage and some gauze down there off to the left. Reach in and get it, would you? I have to clean off the area first."

Alex reached into the bag, felt around, and yelped when she realized her arm was in the bag up to the elbow. "What the – it's bigger on the inside?"

"Yeah, it is," Willow asked, grimly avoiding the usual Dr. Who joke, which Faith would never admit she got anyway. "Sorry. It's my, to quote Andrew, 'Bag of Holding.' I've got a lot of stuff in there. The bandages are about a foot down on the left hand side."

"Got them," Alex said, pulled out a medical kit, and opened it. "Here you go."

"Hold on a bit," Willow said. "This will sting but only for a second." She started rubbing the paste on and Ryan reacted like he'd just been jabbed with a needle. "Hold still!" Willow commanded.

"Okay. It's gone," Ryan said. "What's in that stuff?"

"You've never heard of most of the ingredients," Willow said. "But the main one is venom from a European hornet." She took the bandage and gauze from Alex.

"Hornet venom?" Alex asked.

"I said it would sting," Willow said. "What did you think I meant?" In the mood they were all in, Willow probably wasn't joking, either.

"If you're done reenacting MASH over there," Michael said. "We should probably get going."

"You okay?" Nikita asked Ryan.

"Well, I've been shot and stung, but otherwise I'm good," Ryan said sarcastically.

"Good to know," Nikita said. "Willow?"

"'Mom," Willow said, and yeah, Faith could hear the quotes around the word Mom, "hasn't really moved. She's still above us."

"Hold on, I'll ask. Birkhoff wants to know how far up."

"At this point, somewhere between 175-200 feet. Why?"

A second later, Nikita said, "Because that would put her not in the abandoned mall, but on its roof."

"How sure are you that that's where she is?" Alex asked.

A little irritable, Willow said, "Pretty damned sure. But, you know, that means we could have bypassed this fighting our way up and just climbed up the outside of the building. It's like we're in a freaking video game."

gWhat's she doing on the roof?" Michael asked.

"This is Amanda," Alex said. "She probably thinks it's funny to look down on all of us scrambling around."

But Nikita was shaking her head. "No. Not from Amanda. At least, that's not all of it."

Faith said, "Why ain't as important as where right now. And where is up and out. I'm guessing we're too far away from any exits to make just going outside a good idea?" Faith asked.

Nikita relayed this to Birkhoff, who said back, "Yeah. There's only one way in below the surface, and that's how we got in here."

"Okay. Wolfensteining it it is," Willow muttered.

"The hallway's clear of guards as far as I can see," Michael said.

"Birkhoff says there's a freight elevator a bit off in that direction," Nikita said, pointing.

Faith said, "Naaah. Once we're on an elevator we're screwed if any of their tech guys figure it out. I can climb a few hundred feet, and probably the three of you can, but Red's not up to our standard – no offense – and Tommy's got a bum arm. Now I could carry him if I had to, but I'd rather not have to."

"Stairs it is," Ryan said.

"Okay, then," Nikita said. "We're not going back the way we came. The second closest set is in the same direction. So I say we go in the other direction."

"Sounds good to me," Faith said. Everyone else agreed.

Looking out the cracked door quickly, Michael said, "Hall's still mostly clear."

The new marching order put Ryan and Willow in the middle – Ryan's good arm still holding his weapon – Faith and Alex in the front, Nikita and Michael in the back. They jogged down the hall a hundred feet or so, past a couple of people who were still lugging shit around like they were going to make it out of here before someone stopped them, and hung a fast left.

Brought up a question. "Yo, Nicky," Faith said. "Any word from Shaggy about how the rest of the crew're doing?"

"Pretty good," Nikita said. "One group came in through the garage, the other through an entrance that came out in – well, Birkhoff said Gigi called it a lobby. They've both made some progress. The first group is headed down where the prisoners are kept, in hopes of finding someone alive – apparently the garage was packed and it took them a while to fight their way through."

"Okay. Good. They know the priorities." Buffy always said that rule number one was "Don't die." Good idea, yeah, but if 'don't die' was the first thing a Slayer should give a crap about, they'd be doing a whole lot less running around saving people. Which were you more likely to die from? Facing a horde of vamps, or sitting at home watching reruns of The Golden Girls?

Still, Buffy was pretty stubborn about shit like that, so they'd just made up rule zero: Don't let someone else die.

This far into the evac, and given what they'd heard out of the assholes on the stairs, probably anyone left down there was dead or dying. Still, though, if there was a chance, they took it.

Faith was just glad it wasn't Gigi, though. Ever since that Russian mobster'd shot Claudia – he'd been aiming for Gigi, but Claudia'd shoved her out of the way – Gigi'd been damn near a fanatic about making sure no one else got hurt. And she went apeshit when innocent people were hurt. She found torture victims down there it'd take a squad of slayers to hold her back.

"Here's the stairs. This should take us up to the top, and from there we can find a way into the mall and then the roof," Nikita said. "That good for everyone?"

"Fine by me," Alex said. Everyone else said they were good, too.

"Okay, then," Nikita said. "Up, up, and away."

Willow said, "And watch out for people saying _Guten Tag_."


	22. Get Brutally Killed and Learn

Things were getting hectic back at this ersatz mission control. For people who said they didn't do this kind of thing very often, they were really good at doing it. For someone who couldn't be much past twenty, Claudia was a genius at keeping everyone and what they were doing straight, and figuring out what they should do next.

Sonya, in the meantime, had deflected the Laurel and Maryland State Police from investigating any disturbances by simply diverting all associated 911 calls to her own phone. (As to why the Baltimore County PD hadn't come around to see what all the gunfire was about this morning, apparently the Academy had an under-the-table agreement with the local cops about such things. That's what Robin Wood had spent most of the morning handling.)

Most of his time was spent helping Nikita find Amanda. And that was fine by him.

The Shop apparently had more money than they knew what to do with, based on the floor plan and the sheer size of the Laurel Center complex. Division had swung too far in the opposite direction – the place had been designed mostly in early fallout shelter. Still, while Birkhoff thought Division could have done with an entertainment complex and maybe a few paintings on the walls, the Shop had gone ridiculously far in the other direction. How they'd even managed to get this place built, he had no clue. In spyfic, the bad guys managed to set up luxurious underground lairs with no problem, but in the real world, you needed people to build these things, and a lot of equipment. Beneath the basement of the Laurel Center, stretching down a few hundred feet, there were eight levels, all of which were at least the size of the mall, and some of which were bigger.

From bottom to top: the "dungeon;" a large storage area, with a fully stocked gymnasium; a lab level; two residential levels, one for the rank and file, one for the higher-ups; another laboratory level; an office level, with a cafeteria, an entertainment complex, and a few other luxuries; and the upper level, for the people in charge, and security.

Right now Nikita and company were halfway between the upper lab level and the office level, and the higher they got up the more deserted it was. Seemed like most of the executive rats had blown the sinking ship early. Why Amanda had stayed behind, he had no idea. He'd long ago given up trying to figure out how that bitch's mind worked.

He hadn't even thought anything she could have done would surprise him, but then she had to go and prove him wrong by having a kid. A kid who, thankfully, seemed to hang around much nicer people than Amanda had.

Gunfire, and then Nikita said, "A couple of guards poked their heads out of the office landing, saw us, and started shooting."

"Everyone okay?"

"We're better shots." After a second, "Shit. That got someone else's attention in there. We're going to have to double time it." Sounds of running, a distant shout or two, and then some motion. After a minute Nikita, a little out of breath, said, "Just moved a copy machine into their way. Where do we go now? The floor sounds empty."

Birkhoff gave them directions and they made it up to the security level with no problems. "Okay," he said. "None of the main staircases go up to the outside level, and I'm betting every single one of the ones that are are guarded – or at least, they're supposed to be."

Next to him, Claudia said, "Oh my God."

"Hold on a second," Birkhoff said. "What is it?"

"Look at this." Everyone crowded around her monitor. "This is what they found in the dungeon."

He'd thought a storage unit full of arms was bad. This? This made that look like a normal walk-in refrigerator.

He'd thought he was beyond surprise. This, though –

"Proof," Giles said, "That one need not be inhuman to be a monster." Like they'd needed more.

"Is anyone alive?" Birkhoff asked.

"I hope not," Claudia said. "After going through – through that –"

"For some, death may indeed be a mercy," Giles said. "Others may have continued to fight for life no matter what the quality of that life may have been. Anyone who is alive, we rescue."

"Did you hear that?" Claudia said.

"Way ahead of you," said the voice on the other end. "We're not going to stop until everyone's out of here."

Crap. Birkhoff thought of something. "The gas," he said.

"Huh?" Claudia said.

"Can I have that?" Claudia handed over her headset. "This is Birkhoff," he said. "Nikita ran across a couple of scientists talking about gassing everyone left down there. Be careful."

"This is Steph," the woman at the other end said. "We will."

In video games, control rooms tended to be at the other end of a complex – or at least require trips there, and back, before you could access the secret staircase. The real world wasn't so convoluted. "Hold on a second," he said, and moved back over to his computer. Pulling up the dungeon's floorplan, he examined it carefully. Moving back, he put the headset back on and said, "Southeast end. You'll need to go up a flight to get there." The dungeon had two levels, one mostly for whoever was watching the prisoners, and one for the prisoners/subjects themselves.

Steph said, "I see it. Thanks."

"Welcome." He passed the headset back to Claudia and returned to his own computer. "Sorry about that," he told Nikita. "Steph's group made it into the dungeon."

"As bad as we thought?"

"Worse," Birkhoff said flatly. "I'll tell you about it later, if you're in the mood for a horror story. Okay. Closest way to the surface –"

"We're already there," Nikita said.

"You are?"

"We weren't going to just sit around and wait for you," Nikita said, though she didn't sound particularly upset. "We didn't think we had the time."

"Okay. Any more problems?"

"Ran across four guards on the security level," Nikita said. "Four fewer now. We managed to convince one of them to tell us where the nearest surface exit was. Remind me never to get on Faith's bad side. Not just because she's probably a better fighter than I am –" in the distant, he could hear a barked laugh and a skeptical "probably?" – "But because she's a hell of an interrogator."

"Will do," Birkhoff said. "Okay. Where are you?" He needed to reorient himself.

"We came out not far off what looks like the center."

"Okay. Do you see anything looking up?"

"A ceiling."

"How high up is the ceiling?"

"Maybe forty feet. Hold on." A second later, "Willow says Amanda's up and roughly South."

"Okay," Birkhoff said. "That would put her above the food court. Okay. Through the court, off to your left as you're facing it, there's a hallway. The mall security office is back there at the end of the hall. There's a stairway to the roof from there."

"Okay," Nikita said.

"I'm sure I don't need to say this," Birkhoff said. "But Amanda wouldn't be just standing there waiting there without something up her sleeve. Be careful."

"Never hurts to hear it again," she said. "Thanks."

"Anytime."

XXXXXX

Amanda smiled. A few of The Shop's minor functionaries – no one higher than a lab tech or office employee – had come sprinting out of the Sears garage entrance within the last thirty minutes or so as though being chased by a horde of the vampires almost certainly none of them actually believed existed.. No more than a trickle – and none of them looked to be in anything like peak physical condition. The board members, she guessed, had been the first ones put of the complex, so they would live, unpunished for now. And that was fine by Amanda. The phrase was "live and learn," not "get brutally killed and learn."

The guard she'd, in the parlance, "gotten the drop on," had left her official phone behind, and unlocked. This had enabled Amanda to eavesdrop upon the events down below. While she would freely admit to not having a clear picture of things, from all she had heard she was reasonably certain the survivors down below would not be particularly pleased with that condition for quite a while. There had been three assault forces; she had seen only two, which meant the third – which must have had Nikita, as she had not been either of the two visible attacking forces, nor would she allow herself to not be part of an assault one of whose aims was assuredly to find Amanda, even if she had successfully manipulated Nikita's allies into making the Shop their main target, rather than herself – had to have been through the hardware store entrance.

They would, metaphorically speaking, tear their hair out trying to find her. All she had to do was wait out the attack, descend, and leave.

The door opened behind her. She turned around and received one of the bigger shocks she'd ever gotten in her life.

XXXXXX

Nikita hadn't needed Birkhoff's words of warning, of course, but it was always nice to hear them. Truth was, she'd been trying to figure out what Amanda was doing ever since Willow'd pegged her as more or less standing still.

Of course, in the bigger picture, it didn't matter. If she was up there, wasn't waiting for a helicopter, and hadn't suddenly developed the ability to fly, then the why part of things was a minor issue. Where and who were a lot more important.

The food court was shuttered and mostly emptied of furniture. Tags covered three of the six columns and some of the walls. A few chairs lay scattered.

"There's the hallway Birkhoff was talking about," Nikita said.

As they walked over, Willow, looking at the roof thoughtfully, said, "I think I could blast a hole through the roof now. "We're close enough. No chance of going dark."

"Okay, I have to ask," Alex said. "This is the second or third time I've heard you make mention of 'Dark Willow.' Is that like another personality, or something?"

Faith opened her mouth and looked like she was ready to say something – and she didn't seem happy – but Willow said, "It's okay, Faith. Like I said, no chance. Another personality's not a bad way to look at it, though. Someone murdered my girlfriend a while back and I kind of sort of went off the rails. I wanted a quick burst of power to track down the bastard who'd done it, so I chose some, well, questionable sources, and that didn't really help me get back on the rails. I killed the man who'd done it and then tried to destroy the world."

"―the world?" Michael asked. Hell, Amanda and Percy didn't want to destroy the world. They didn't even want to rule it.

"The world," Willow confirmed. "You'll notice, though, the world? Still here. So I try to avoid using too much magic at once, or using it when I'm mad, because the temptation's always there. And I kind of like the world. It's a good place."

Well, that explained why everyone had been pretty much walking on eggshells back in the Academy – and the Hulk reference, for that matter.

"Okay," Alex said. "Can't say that was the answer I was expecting . . . "

"Don't worry," Willow said. "I'm feeling much better now."

Ryan chuckled, but apparently no one else got the joke. Of course, the mood in the area was such that nothing short of the Marx Brothers teaming up with the Three Stooges and Leslie Nielsen would have stood a chance of making anyone crack a smile.

"There's the office – look out!" Two more security guards, one male, one female, were walking out of what had to be security office Birkhoff had mentioned. Everyone had their weapon pointed in seconds. The woman started to pull her gun out of its holster when the man grabbed her arm, pointed to the four pistols and one crossbow aimed at them, and said, "Really?"

"But –" she said.

"They've caught us and unless you're pulling down a shitload more than I am we're not getting paid well enough to get ourselves killed."

"But – downstairs –" Everything seemed okay at the moment, no one was sneaking up behind them, so Nikita was content to let the situation play out. If the woman tried to finish drawing her revolver she'd be dropped before she could get it halfway out.

"Did you catch them or experiment on them?" Nikita asked.

"No," the woman said.

"Then we've got no reason to want you dead," Nikita said.

"See?" the man said.

"You know the routine," Michael said. "Put them down and slide them towards us." They did so. Michael took them and unloaded them, and stowed them.

"We don't want you dead," Faith said, walking up to the two guards. "But. While you didn't catch the people in the dungeons or torture them, you sure as shit stood around and watched while other people did. So, not dead." She then hit the two so quickly Nikita wasn't sure she'd seen it, until they both crumpled to the floor. "Hurt's fine, though." She then stepped over their bodies into the office. "You guys coming, or what?" she asked.

They found the stairs leading up. Willow took a deep breath and said, "She's still up there. Okay. You all agree you're not going to kill her, right?"

She'd thought they were past this, but, sarcastically – "Yes. I assume we have an out if she pulls out a bazooka and starts shooting?" Amanda was about as likely to do this as she was to sprout wings and fly off the roof, but she was perfectly capable of pulling out a pistol.

A pause, then, "I suppose so. But I'd better see bullets flying, missy."

"Are you making a joke?" Michael asked.

"I'm not sure," Willow said. "But I don't expect you guys to commit suicide or anything."

"Good enough," Nikita said firmly. "Let's go."

They walked up the stairs. Willow said, "Let me walk through first."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Nikita said.

Faith said, "Yeah. I'm with her on this one."

Willow said, "I'm probably the only person in this group she doesn't want dead."

Nikita had to concede the point. "Okay, then," she said. "Go ahead."

The rest of the way up was silent, until they got to the top. Getting everyone's attention, Nikita silently counted down from five to one, and after one pointed at Willow.

Willow opened the door, Nikita right behind her. Amanda turned around, clearly startled.

"Mother," Willow said. "_Guten Tag_."


	23. The War Ground and the World's Pain

Yeah, Willow'd said to watch out for people saying "_Guten Tag,_" but Faith hadn't thought she'd meant herself. Still, she hadn't been acting like she was ready to go on tilt and level them, her mother, the building, or the planet, so things were okay at the moment.

And Amanda actually looked surprised. Way she'd heard Nikita tell it, getting the mental drop on Amanda was damn near impossible. So something about this wasn't going the way she'd planned. And it was always good to throw the bad guys off their game. Even if this one was a lot less likely to try to end the world than to fuck with their heads, every little bit helped.

Next to her, Nikita was grinning like the cat that ate the canary, the mouse, and the guinea pig, and was doing its level best to polish off the chicken. Alex and Michael looked angry, still. Ryan looked calm, though if he was actually calm, he could've given Oz pointers in serene.

Amanda, meantime, had recovered quickly, though not fast enough that any of them hadn't seen her momentary panic. "Willow. Dear," she said. "I wasn't aware you'd learned German."

"I picked up a little here and there," Willow said.

"And Nikita. I suppose I should let you know that if I'm taken into custody or killed that there is someone out there who will make certain your clear picture gets out there as having killed the President."

Nikita looked around at Alex, Ryan, and finally Michael, and said, "I think that's a risk I'm willing to take. You almost won, Amanda. You almost convinced me to abandon them, to let them go. But you didn't."

"She didn't even almost win," Michael said.

"Oh?" Amanda said. "How so?"

"Because she didn't try to leave us because we were causing her pain," Alex said. "She tried to leave us because she was causing us pain. And that's not the lesson you were trying to teach us."

"Alexandra," Amanda said. "Started any revolutions lately?"

Faith didn't get that, and neither did Willow, but apparently everyone else did. "One," Alex said, "Was enough."

"Yes," Nikita said. "And we'd like to thank you for doing something that I worked for three years to do. Turns out I could've gotten done what I wanted a lot quicker by somehow kicking you out of Division and leaving myself in there. Who knew?"

"And now no one has what they want," Amanda said.

"Way you say that," Faith said, "Sounds like you think you're teaching us a lesson." Faith was sure of it. Watchers had the same smug attitude at times, but at least what they were trying to teach you wasn't that life sucked.

"I am," Amanda said. "And who might you be?"

"I might be the next Lotto winner," Faith said. "If that ticket I bought last night pays off. Otherwise, I'm just what you see right in front of you." She laughed. "And what the fuck lesson you teaching, anyway? 'Life sucks'? Figured that out when I was ten years old, myself."

"Then congratulations," Amanda said, sneering. "You picked that up a lot earlier than everyone around you seems to."

"Yeah, I'm a freaking genius," Faith said. "Look, all you gotta do is look around to figure that out. It ain't hard."

"Nikita appears not to have learned it yet," Amanda said.

"Ha!" Nikita said. "I figured that out a long, long time ago. The problem isn't that life sucks, the problem is that I think it's worth doing something to try to change that."

"It is," Willow said.

"Willow," Amanda said again. "You've been awfully quiet."

"Trust me, mother," Willow said. "You really don't want to hear what I have to say right now."

Amanda said, "I imagine it would be insults, imprecatory comments hurled my way, comments about how my parenting style is little better than that of a cowbird, and that you hate me forever?"

"Hate you?" Willow said coldly. "Mother, I don't hate you."

Alex and Ryan looked a little worried at that, but Faith gave them a 'trust her' gesture. She mostly did. There was a small part of that still thought Willow might go ballistic any second, but it was only a small part, more like her being prepared for anything than her actually thinking Laurel, Maryland was going to be a war ground for the next apocalypse.

"The way you treated me," Willow continued, "Ever since I was even vaguely old enough to take care of myself long ago guaranteed that the most I would ever feel for you was a vague sense of gratitude that you gave me enough money to live on and didn't, you know, throw me out on the street. And up until about twelve hours ago, that is exactly what I felt for you. But now?"

"Now you want me painfully dead?" Amanda asked.

Willow's bitter laugh was joined a second later by Nikita's. "No," Nikita said. "I want you dead. It doesn't even have to be painful, though you long ago earned that. But that doesn't matter. Willow doesn't want you dead. So you're not going to die. Yet." Amanda seemed confused.

"And that, Mother, is what love gets you. You're my mother, despite not having done much in that capacity beyond the biological and financial senses. So you don't die."

And even though she'd just been caught flat-footed and apparently had no way out, Amanda smiled. "Willow. I am so proud of you."

"Huh?" Everyone said at about the same time.

"You were my most important object: Proving that a child given all the material assistance it needs –" It? It? Even her drunken bitch of a mother'd never called Faith it – "and a minimum of emotional attention could not only survive, but thrive. And look at you now. You're one of the finest computer experts on the planet; you're wealthy –"

"You're rich, Red?" Faith asked. She'd known Willow wasn't exactly poor, but didn't think she was rolling in it.

"I've made good investments," Willow said. "I learned some things from Anya. And is that really important right now?"

"No. It ain't. Sorry about that," Faith said.

"As I was saying," Amanda said, "You're rich. And if what I hear about your – other activities – is correct, you've assisted in saving the world from utter destruction a number of times."

"I'd've thought you'd've wanted the world destroyed," Alex said bitterly.

"Me? Alexandra, in the end, nothing matters, but that hardly makes me genocidal. Diogenes the cynic was once asked what the difference between life and death was. His response was that there was none. His questioner followed up by asking him why he didn't kill himself, then. Diogenes' response?"

"'cause there's no difference," Faith said.

Eyebrows raising, Amanda said, "Yes."

"You don't need to look surprised," Faith said. "Southie don't mean uneducated. 'course, that still doesn't mean I know what your fucking point is."

"If nothing matters, why destroy the world?" Amanda said.

Faith got the point, though she didn't agree. From the looks on their faces, everyone else but maybe Alex also got it.

And she had a response. Angel had said it once. "If nothing we do matters," she quoted, "Then all that matters is what we do."

"The world might be crap, Amanda," Nikita said. "We shouldn't make it worse. Saving one life might not mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but it means a lot to that one person."

Willow, in the meantime, was laughing again. It wasn't an amused laugh, or a cold one. It was almost the kind of laugh she would've expected to come from the Joker, if the Joker was a woman. Only reason Faith wasn't in full panic mode is that Willow's voice, when she spoke, was colder than ice. "Mother. 'If nothing matters, why destroy the world?' Would you mind if I answered that?"

"Of course –" Amanda began.

Willow interrupted her by telekinetically picking her up for a second and then putting her back down. "That was a rhetorical question. Somehow, you know that I helped to save the world. What you don't know is that once, I tried to end it."

"Really?" Amanda asked. Had to give the bitch credit. She had to be shaken from being – well, shaken – but she wasn't showing much of it. Of course, a stone cold psychopath wouldn't be showing much either, so scratch the credit.

"Yes. And do you want to know why? Again, rhetorical, open your mouth and you'll be fifteen feet up and falling, I swear. I tried to end it because, for one moment, I felt people's pain. Everyone's pain. And the best way I could think of to end their pain was to destroy everything. One blast of fire and it would have all been over. The only people left alive would have been whatever poor fools were in space at the time, and all they would have gotten to do afterward was write the world's epitaph."

"So you felt something, and you tried to destroy the world," Amanda said. "Sounds like you're proving my point. Something mattered to you. Compassion causes pain."

"Their pain would have been there whether I would have felt it or not. And there were, and are, much better ways of trying to cure pain than killing the patient."

"None more efficient," Amanda said.

"True," Willow said. "If efficiency's the most important thing. But even if you're being utilitarian, Mother, killing patients who can be saved is a horrendous waste of resources."

"Also true," Amanda said. "Which is another reason I've never tried to destroy the world."

"You'll notice the world's still here, though," Willow said. "Would you like to know why?"

From a bit behind her, Ryan said, "I would. But can I ask a question?"

"Sure!" Willow said, somehow sounding a lot more cheerful. "This is a group effort, after all."

"We agreed not to kill her," Ryan said, "But is there a reason we haven't captured her yet? Right now, all we're doing is standing around and talking with her. Wouldn't this be a better conversation to have after she's safely locked up in a cell somewhere?" He took a breath, and then said, "Look. I get that you've got a lot of stuff to work through. Finding out Amanda's your mother and that your whole life was basically an evil psych experiment can't be fun. But can't we do that later?"

"Am I going to get the chance?" Willow asked.

At this, everyone looked at Nikita. "We'll give you the chance," she said. "Birkhoff?" she said into her headset. "What are we doing about anyone we catch?"

Which was a point; Nikita and her friends weren't exactly in good with the authorities. Fortunately, they weren't acting alone, either. "Relax," she said. "We got this."

"We do?" Alex asked.

"Thanks," Nikita said. "Yeah, they've got it. Someone from the Academy is going to take Amanda directly back there so we can have some time with her."

"And everyone else?" Alex asked.

"Look down there," Faith said. Everyone, including Amanda, spun to see where Faith was pointing. At the edge of the fenced-in parking lot was a good-sized group of people . . in full army gear.

"Who's that?" Michael asked flatly.

"Remember back in the meeting," Faith said, "When we mentioned our friend? The one Xander said was a client of the genefucking club for men?"

"That's him?" Ryan said.

"That's him," Faith confirmed.

"We need to get out of here," Alex said. "We can't let Nikita get seen."

Amanda said, "It appears you have backed yourself into a corner."

And Willow said, "Mother. You really don't understand what the word 'friend' means, do you? That man out there is willing to cut us slack. He's willing to help us for no other reason than that he likes us. If we ask him to look the other way, he will."

"Are you willing to bet Nikita's life on that?" Michael asked.

"Whatever else soldier-boy out there might do," Faith said, "He sure as shit ain't gonna shoot anyone on sight. Unless they're a vampire. But I'm thinking we're out here in the middle of the day, so right now, we're all good."

Ryan said, "Okay. Good. We've established that we're going to take Amanda there into custody. Could one of us actually do it? I'd feel a lot more comfortable if she had a gag in her mouth."

Michael and Nikita gave him a fishy look, Alex and Willow giggled, Faith guffawed, and even Amanda managed a smile. "Didn't know you thought that way, Tommy," Faith said. "Maybe when we're done you could show me some of the things you want to do with that gag."

Ryan took it for the teasing it was – not like Faith would've turned him down if he said yes, he was certainly good-looking enough, but she wasn't expecting it – and just rolled his eyes. Alex, over her giggle fit, pulled a pair of handcuffs from somewhere, walked over, and told Amanda to put her hands behind her back.

"And if I don't?" Amanda asked.

Faith said, "Trust me. We'll make you."

Amanda looked in Faith's eyes, figured out she wasn't kidding – 'cause she sure as shit wasn't – and, sighing dramatically, put her arms behind her back. Alex came over, jerked the arms a few times "just to get them into the right position" – and since that was probably less than a thousandth of the grief the bitch had caused them, Faith wasn't about to bitch about it.

They walked back down to the food court area, stepping back over the two groaning Shop security guards, Amanda dead center, flanked by Nikita and Michael. A few seconds later an army squad came bursting through the doors to the outside, weapons pointed at them.

"Hands up, everyone," Nikita said, raising her hands slowly. "Amanda, don't try anything."

Everyone but Amanda put their hands up – hey, better safe, you know? – and Amanda wisely didn't say anything. A few seconds later a voice from behind them said, "They're okay. Go clear out the rest of the building."

As the squad hustled away and everyone put their hands down, Faith called after them, "Yo! Bookstore's got the closest way downstairs. To the left."

Then the owner of the voice – Riley Finn, of course – walked up. "Heya, Smallville," Faith said. "What's shakin'?"

Willow also said, "Hi, Riley!"

"A lot of people up and down the chain of command," he said. "I can't believe we missed this. Someone was supposed to be keeping an eye on these clowns."

"Clowns are funny," Willow said. "Well, unless you ask Xander. This, not so much with the funny."

"Not even close," Riley said. "How'd you find about it?" And why didn't you tell us sooner? She could clearly hear him asking.

"Luck," Faith said. "My friend back there asked us for a favor and this is what it led to." She pointed to Nikita.

"And who is your friend?" Riley asked.

"Someone who was never here," Faith said. "None of them. It was me, Willow, and a squad of Slayers. Got it?"

Riley leaned in and said, quietly, "I get the story later, right?"

Willow said, "More than you're getting now. Not all of it's our story."

"But what we can tell you, we will. Promise," Faith said.

"Okay. And her?" he pointed to Amanda.

"She's coming with us, too," Faith said. "We might turn her over to you later. Maybe in pieces, maybe not."

"Okay." He leaned even closer and whispered. "Though one of the things you're going to have to explain is why you're leading your own mother out in handcuffs."

As Willow's jaw dropped, Riley smiled, said "Good day," and went to follow his squad.

"I'm for getting out of here," Nikita said when he was gone. "How about the rest of you?"

As they walked out, Amanda said, "What did that man say to you, Willow?"

Willow straightened up and said, "Be quiet, Mother."

"Such scorn in the way you call me mother," Amanda said.

"Would it be better if I used both words?"


End file.
